The Grinch Of SantaCon Comes Around

John Law tries to make peace with his creation

BY ROBERT MCMILLAN

Many people loathe SantaCon, the annual event that brings the sound of sleigh bells and the sight, and smell, of hundreds of drunken Santas to city streets around the world.

Until recently, John Law avoided the event—which is strange because he helped create it more than 30 years ago.

Then he grew disillusioned and embarrassed by what it had become.

But a new documentary about the history of SantaCon features an unexpected sight: Law, donning a red cap, parading through the streets of New York as a mob of revelers

shower him with praise.

A product of an anarchic group called the Cacophony Society, SantaCon has come to be seen by many as an annoying pub crawl. To attendees, it is a riotous holiday event.

To Law and creator Rob Schmitt, it’s something more complex.

In 2010, about 15 years after the first SantaCon, held in San Francisco, Law remembers stepping out of his front door into a mob of drunken Santas. Some were being ejected from a local cafe, hundreds more were partying in the park around the corner.

“Payback,” Law thought to himself after watching one of them vomit. At that point, Law didn’t want the world to know he had had anything to do with the event. “I was embarrassed,” he said.

He texted Schmitt. “Hey Rob. F—you.”

Schmitt texted back immediately. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

Schmitt was the event’s founder, but for many early participants Law was its face. He was constantly barking orders to the Santas, bullhorn in hand. He was also the voice of reason when the police swooped in, as they frequently did in the early days. And he was SantaCon’s resident daredevil, climbing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1998, only to hop back to earth and blend in anonymously with the SantaCon New York crowd.

The whole thing seemed like “kind of a big f—you to the holiday,” Law says.

Schmitt created the event after seeing a Christmas card featuring a half-dozen Santas hanging out and playing pool. SantaCon was simply about “more Santa,” he said.

Together, Schmitt and Law helped turn the event into an international phenomenon, where thousands of revelers descend upon urban neigh-borhoods in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada.

The first few events sat somewhere between performance art and pure anarchy. The philosophy was to treat the world as a game. “And everybody else is involved in the game too; they just might not see it the same way we do,” Law said.

He was one of 39 original Santas who started a snowball fight with teenagers near San Francisco’s Ferry Building in 1994. He’s been kicked out of a tiki bar, ridden on a city bus full of Santas that was pulled over by police, and late one night in 1995, he was strung up to a light pole on San Francisco’s Market Street.

Law’s relationship with Santa already had some baggage. “I believed in him until I was 9 years old and then I found out it was all bulls— and it ruined my life,” Law says in the new film, “Santacon,” premiering Nov. 13 at DOC NYC film festival.

SantaCon didn’t ruin his life, but Law stopped attending in the late 1990s. He felt it had creatively run out of gas.

Law had nothing to do with the event for nearly 25 years. Then in 2022, “Santacon’s” director, Seth Porges, convinced him that he had to come back and face SantaCon. Porges said he thought it would make for a good scene in his documentary.

“At some point Dr. Frankenstein has to come face-toface with his monster,” Porges said.

Law couldn’t say no to a free trip.

In “Santacon,” he and Schmitt don their red caps once more to wrestle with the modern SantaCon.

Schmitt seems game for the exercise but Law is reluctant. “Oh my God, Do I really want to do this?” he asks around 10 a.m., as they hit the streets of Midtown Manhattan for SantaCon.

Once word gets out that these two are Original Clauses, the men are hailed as heroes. “The entire city of New York appreciates you guys,” yells one reveler as a crowd of hundreds of Santas, elves and ugly-Christmassweater- wearing revelers whoop it up in front of a Starbucks at Broadway and West 40th Street.

Later, Law and Schmitt watch as a Santa is frisked and then put into a police car for having an open container. It is 11 a.m.

A few hours later, at a nightclub, Law laughs as a silver Jack Frost with a bullhorn yells to the clubbers to “Dance for Santa! Dance for Santa!”

By the time Porges grabbed dinner with Law and Schmitt at the end of the day, he realized Law had had a sort of SantaCon epiphany.

“What I think [he] realized was: the only thing that’s more annoying than SantaCon,” Porges said, “is being the person who is constantly complaining about SantaCon.”