Even though Christmas Eve is only around the corner, Santa has already been seen – in fact, hundreds of times.
That’s the legacy of Santacon Hoboken, the mid-December festival that sees tens of thousands of Santas parade through the streets, make merry, and generally tarnish the North Pole’s image. It’s a nice moment to think about the significance of the occasion as we soak up Santa’s Christmas happiness.
Santacon parties turn out to be more than a simple bar crawl. It’s an event aiming to continually shift due to its unexpected beginnings.
1) What is SantaCon, exactly?
SantaCon is a loosely planned roaming event in which people dress up as Santa Claus, elves, or other holiday characters and parade through a city in various degrees of inebriation.
Unlike other adult party days such as St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween, it is not coordinated by a single organization, but there may be a prominent organization in a city (with varying degrees of cooperation with local businesses).
The main event, Santacon Boston, describes itself as a “charitable, non-commercial, non-political, nonsensical Santa Claus convention that takes place once a year for no apparent reason.” Most SantaCons throughout the world use that definition, which combines a flash mob sensibility with Christmas festivity (albeit with different names and local flavors).
Santa Con, on the other hand, isn’t simply a harmless Christmas sleigh ride, according to its detractors. In a sharply written op-ed in the New York Times, Jason O. Gilbert wrote: “For those living in calm forgetfulness, SantaCon is an annual custom in which revelers dress up like KrissKringle (or, at the very least, put on a Santa hat) and go on a mass bar crawl, squeezing 12 nights of Christmas boozing into a single day.”
Since when SantaCon been going on
Santacon Parties origins are especially startling to people who only know it from the drink specials: you have to go back to the 1970s in Denmark.
That’s because the inaugural SantaCon was more of a performance art protest, with Santas putting politics ahead of fun.
Ellen Frank described the story in a 1977 Mother Jones piece (which is also part of SantaCon’s history – more on that later). Frank detailed the efforts of a Danish art association called Solvognen, which was named after a Norse mythological artifact.
Christiania, a semi-autonomous “state” within Copenhagen, was home to many of the group’s members. The anarchists who lived there were critical of the injustice they thought existed in Danish society, which had been worsened by the oil crisis (these anarchists were peaceful — think more hippy than punk). Solvognen’s famed Santa art piece in 1974 was sparked by this.
Around 75 Santas performed a parable in Copenhagen that year. What’s the premise? With each passing day, the Santas gained a better understanding of the commercialization and selfishness that they felt had taken over Christmas. The demonstrations were attractive, amusing, and aggressive at times for New York Santacon. They caroled with an angel on the first day; towards the end of the event, they were destroying structures with pickaxes and throwing out free gifts in a nearby department store.
