SantaCon Festival

Every year in mid-December, just before Catholic Christmas, the fascinating SantaCon festival comes all over the world, in which anyone dressed in a bright red suit with a white edge can take part. 

Where was SantaCon for the first time?

For the first time, a large-scale street event was held in 1994 in San Francisco.

Over time, other cities began to join SantaCon – at first American, then all the others. Today, the Santa Claus Festival is held in forty-four countries and in about three hundred cities around the world. Most of the fairy-tale characters take to the streets of New York, London, Vancouver, Washington, Boston, Belfast and Moscow.

In New York, in addition to classic Santa Clauses and sexy Snow Maidens, you can meet reindeer, pointy-eared elves, evil “Greenwich”, magical fairies, Christmas trees and other Christmas “attributes”.

What is SantaCon?

Initially, the main goal of all Santacons was to collect charitable funds going to the common “festive cauldron” and to help those in need. To do this, the festival participants walked in a noisy crowd through numerous bars and cafes, collecting money from others. Over time, the drinking culture replaced the charity one, and SantaCon turned into a standard Christmas parade, accompanied by merry revelry, fights and skirmishes with the police. But this is in America. In European cities, Santa Claus parades, most often, take place peacefully, and Santa Claus himself does not so much walk as run, trying to win the title of the fastest fairy-tale character of our time.

SantaCon Festival – PHOTO