In the winter of 1996, a cadre of police officers met an airplane as it landed in Portland, Oregon. Santa Claus had come to town.
It was the early years of what would come to be known as Santacon, and the plane carried a contingent of pranksters aiming to create a bit of Yuletide mischief. While the event is best known today as a Christmas season bar crawl, at the time, the Santas involved were all connected to the Cacophany Society, a group of artists, urban explorers, and troublemakers with chapters in several cities.
“It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”
Their first events in San Francisco in 1994 and 1995—then loosely known as Santarchy—were designed to plumb the chaos-producing potential of a crowd dressed up like Santa, and were greeted with a mixture of bewilderment, amusement, and some hostility: the Santas packed department store escalators and danced through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, chanting “ho, ho, ho” in a militaristic and frankly terrifying fashion. They rode the hotel’s revolving doors like a merry-go-round, tossed fake snow, and, once they were inevitably kicked out, flooded the street to stand on newspaper boxes and exuberantly greet passing cars. In Santacon, a straightforwardly named new documentary examining the event across three decades, camcorder footage from that day makes it clear this was a different era: pre-meme, pre-flash mob, pre-viral stunts performed for the internet. Bystanders’ faces reflect unedited shock, worry, confusion, and wild delight. A Hyatt security guard grimly demands, “Who are you guys?”
“Santa!” comes the reply, in a boisterous chorus.
While each member and chapter of Cacophany Society was different, they all saw comedic and artistic possibility in holiday masquerade. But today, Santacon has become a bit of a different sort of cultural juggernaut, a now-infamous yearly event wherein drunken Santas take to the streets of major cities and loose unspeakable quantities of bodily fluids upon them. People hide in their apartments from Santacon, take alternate routes to avoid it, and write screeds against it. It is, safe to say, a nuisance, a bummer, and a major cause of power-washing large areas of midtown Manhattan.
While the chaos is well known to the NYPD, when the Santas came to Portland in 1996, cops there were convinced that something akin to terrorism was taking place. The police knew their itinerary and trailed them around. “There were like 200 cops,” says John Law, an early participant. “Someone dropped the dime on us. I have a lot of suspicions about who. They said evil anarchist Santas were coming to Portland.”
The Santas edged cautiously around town, unsure what activities would get them arrested, or maybe even beaten up. The weekend culminated with a line of Santas facing off against a line of riot cops in face shields, who seemed, the Santas thought, worryingly eager for an excuse to crack some furry-hatted heads.
“We really didn’t want to get arrested,” Law says. “Our intention wasn’t to fight the police. It was just to have fun.” By the end of the weekend, the Santas returned home, and Portland was safe from the too-exuberant Christmas cheer for another year.
You can see these tender and utterly weird early years of Santacon in the documentary from director and co-producer Seth Porges, the filmmaker behind Class Action Park and How to Rob a Bank. (He knows a little something about crime, chaos, and injury.) The movie, which premieres November 13 at the DOC NYC festival, combines interviews with some of the earliest Santas with archival and little-seen footage of the first Santacons. With Christmas just around the corner, it is a timely reminder that the event’s roots are far more interesting, anarchistic, and creative than what it has become.
“People go into the film like ‘Fuck Santacon,’” Porges told me. “By the end, they come to a more nuanced perspective, that’s like acceptance in a way.”
The unruly seeds of what would eventually become Santacon were accidentally planted in the US by this very magazine. In 1977, Mother Jones ran a story about Solvognen, a radical Danish theater troupe who had launched a cheerful anti-capitalist protest counterprogramming Christmastime materialism. The article’s description sounds remarkably like what the first few American Santacons looked like, with Santas descending on a Copenhagen department store, pulling books off shelves and insisting shoppers take them for free. After police arrived, the Santas were beaten and thrown into paddywagons.
“Watching bystanders are horrified,” author Ellen Frank wrote. “Children became hysterical.”
The Danish Santas also scaled the walls of a recently closed General Motors plant and serenaded the remaining employees, and delivered a disquisition on workers’ rights outside a local court. All of it, one participant explained, had a larger purpose: “We are trying to help the political movement to not be so square.”
While this Mother Jones connection isn’t mentioned in the film, the movie does make clear that the event’s earliest American participants were, and are, the kind of people who take part in influential art stunts; ambitious urban exploration expeditions; site-specific, secretive, highly weird parties; and other things that usually stay mostly hidden. (Full disclosure: in a jolly coincidence, a number of my friends and acquaintances in New York and San Francisco were early Santacon participants, including Law. I didn’t know this for years, because most of them will not publicly admit it. Recently, I told a close friend I was working on this story, and he began to speak about what he experienced at the first New York event. He stopped the moment I took out my phone to take notes. “Put it away,” he instructed, stonefaced. “I disavow.”)
One person who read the article was Gary Warne, a co-founder of the Suicide Club, a, secretive San Francisco collective who, according to Law, “were the first group that I know of to formalize urban exploration.” Law, now 66, was an original member, as well as an early member of the Cacophany Society, which came later and shares cultural and artistic DNA and a few common members. Law is also a co-founder of the Billboard Liberation Front, which helped pioneer the now-well known practice of “culture jamming” billboards, and also of what was then known as the “Burning Man Festival,” though he hasn’t been involved in that project since 1996. (While he has a great deal to say about what the event has become roughly once a year, otherwise he tries not to think about it.)
“The beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume—it allows you to be who you really are.”
Something about a mass of Santas causing anti-consumerist, merry chaos felt deeply appropriate to the Suicide Club ethos. Warne, who died in 1983, passed the Mother Jones article around, even including a copy in the group’s newsletter, which went out to around 100 people. “He was like ‘Wow, what a funny idea,’” Law says.
One could call this foreshadowing, a faint trembling before the stampede. What would become Santacon didn’t actually begin until two decades later, when Rob Schmitt, a Bay Area Cacophany Society member, saw a postcard with a drawing of a bunch of Santas playing pool at a bar. The idea struck him as beautifully simple, elegant, and very funny. He was also inspired by Burning Man’s first themed camp, which was a Christmas camp, replete with decorated trees and, of course, Santas. While Schmitt says he wasn’t inspired by Warne’s sharing of the Mother Jones article, it doesn’t surprise him that two people connected to the same prankster movement would be struck by the same notion.
“It’s a wonderful thing…Nobody really has an idea. Everybody has it in their head, somewhere, some way,” he says, “It was time. It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”
That first San Francisco event was “magical,” Schmitt says. Besides their hijinks at the Hyatt, Schmitt says he secured 100 cable car tickets so the Santas could stuff together and glide across San Francisco’s hills. They snuck into a debutante ball while the Smothers Brothers performed, and began, as Schmitt puts it, “stealing wine and dancing with the ladies.” They were chased out, but headed to the Tonga Room, a renowned tiki bar where the band plays on a pool-borne boat, and took over the craft. The vibe was uncontrolled but not violent; the goal was to confuse, disorient, and possibly even delight.
“Nobody expected all these Santas,” Schmitt says happily.
“You can’t control Santa,” he adds. “You just can’t.” He loved “the anonymity of this whole thing,” he says, especially when it came to dealing with cops and security guards: “‘Who’s doing this?’ Santa. ‘Who’s in charge?’ Santa.”
“We did it organically,” Law says. ”We didn’t sit down and figure out a ten-point situationist plan on what we were going to do. That’s pretentious bullshit.” (Law was, at one point during the 1995 Santacon, mock-lynched in costume, which does make its own point fairly clearly.)
The one thing Schmitt doesn’t support, then or now, he says, is a bad Santa. “Santa is a good thing. You don’t destroy people’ cars or faces by fighting and things like that. A good Santa doesn’t destroy.”
Not everyone is so tenderhearted about Santa. Chris Hackett—a Brooklyn Cacophany Society member and a co-founder of the Madagascar Institute, an “art combine” that he describes as conducting “massively collaborative” guerilla projects since 1999, helped organize New York’s first Santacon in 1998.
Like Schmitt, Hackett saw Santacon as a time to consider the role of anonymity and mass disguises in society—but he doesn’t think what comes of that is always a beautiful or magical Christmas. “It’s not noble,” he says, sounding upbeat. “It’s not good. It’s kind of fucked up. And that’s the beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume… It allows you to be who you really are, and who you are is fucking disgusting.”
The New York group prepared gifts, wrapping cigarettes and matches in copies of the Village Voice’s x-rated backpage ads. They wrote “Start early, kids” on the packages, Hackett says, and “handed them out to children.”
“I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”
Mo, another early New York Santacon attendee who didn’t want her full name used, recalls a slightly different approach. While she remembers a “workshop” making mutilated toys to be handed out along with “a whole lot of coal,” she also says there were “one or two people who were designated to interact with children and they had candy canes, and clean costumes, and were mostly sober, and they had non-messed up toys.”
“We had fun,” she says. “But ‘Don’t fuck with the cops, don’t fuck with kids,’ that was our MO.”
“Everybody had different ideas about what they were doing with Santacon,” Law concedes. “We had no ideology whatsoever. We were really anti ideology.”
Almost as soon as Santacon began, though, this circle realized it had very little continued creative or chaos potential. Many never participated again. (“One and done,” Hackett says dryly. “I don’t drink.”)
As the original participants drifted away, Santacon took on a new life, becoming the “largely unmediated,” as Law puts it, street party that it is today. “It became the ultimate sign of depravity,” he says. “A lot of my friends, these sophisticated quasi-intellectual types, got embarrassed.”
“I apologize to people all the time,” says Mo. “But I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”
“People are going to take and bastardize something and make it their own,” Hackett says, philosophically. “The thing is, this is a weird balance. You have to have some group of people creating the stuff, the organic movements, so that the people whose job it is to exploit those things have a pipeline.”
Schmitt says he hopes that people are inspired by Santacon, past or present: “Art gives people ideas. I hope other people have ideas, and realize they have permission.”
There is an organizational structure to the current version of Santacon, which describes itself as a “charitable” event. But in 2023 Gothamist found that over an eight year period “less than a fifth” of the money raised by the New York event went to charitable causes, with more than one third of that money going to “groups or individuals who appear connected to Burning Man.” Ryan Kailath, the investigation’s author, also reported that the organization made—and lost money on—crypto investments. (Santacon NYC did not respond to an email seeking comment.)
Porges’ documentary is not the first such evaluation of the event; a particularly beautiful 2017 Harper’s story examined the early years of Santacon, and Schmitt and Law’s long and generative friendship. (The two men are housemates, surviving in San Francisco at a time when many artists and creative troublemakers have been pushed out.) Archivist Scott Beale, the founder of the influential culture site Laughing Squid, has collected the most complete selection of material on Santacon’s earliest years.
But the current-day Santacon organizers seem particularly excited about the new film, even as they don’t seem entirely in on the joke. “When I first heard about this project a few years ago, I worried it might be another ‘shit-on-Santacon’ hit piece,” a Los Angeles Santacon organizer, who calls himself Santa Vescent, wrote on Substack. “But it’s not that at all.” (Maybe not. But without spoiling the documentary’s ending, I can tell you that while its final, more contemporary, scenes are hilarious, they are also deeply unsettling.)
“The folks who created Santacon disowned it as it transformed into something they no longer recognized,” Porges, the filmmaker, told me. “Eventually, that happens to all of us: We find ourselves living in a world we no longer understand or feel at home in. But what do we do next? Do we choose to be angry and demand that things return to some imaginary good old days? Or do we find a way to keep on going through it all, despite it all?”
The more time he spent with the Santacon founders, Porges added, “the more I began to think of this as a movie about living in the rubble. About that most 2025 of feelings: That maybe we now live in a world that doesn’t make much sense to us anymore, even if we were responsible for creating it in the first place.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.