New York City will be filled with thousands of elves, reindeer and Santa Clauses on Dec. 14 for the annual Santacon festivities.
Santacon is a “non-commercial, non-political, non-sensical” convention that happens once a year to spread some holiday spirit, according to their official website. Participants are encouraged to go all-out with their holiday costumes, and wearing just a Santa hat or reindeer antlers are frowned upon.
In the past Santacon has set up donation spots for toys and nonperishable food items for those in need. Bars and venues who participate in Santacon also donate a portion of the profits
“Santacon is not a bar crawl. Every time you call it that, a sugarplum fairy dies,” the convention stated on its website.
The celebration is set to begin at 10 a.m. on Saturday, but the starting point for Sanatcon won’t be revealed until midnight. However, there will no be set route for the convention this year due to overcrowding issues causing heavy traffic and trash problems.
“Santa encourages you to guide your own sleigh – you can plan a route for yourself and your elves ahead of time, or just show up at the start point and see where the holiday spirit takes you,” the convention wrote on their official Facebook event page.
However, Santacon participants are still encourage to meet up at the start up point as 35,000 Santas are expected to gather this year. Participants should sign up for alerts to make sure they’re on top of their Santacon 2013 game.
To sign up just text “follow @santacon” to 40404. Once the Sanatcon holiday events are over, text "unfollow @santacon" to 40404 to stop receiving tweets. You should also be aware of the Twitter SMS commands for the conventio: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020#
You can also follow Sanatcon NYC 2013 on their official website here. Bars will be checking IDs during the event, and are extra vigilant about those who are attempting to drink underage. Police will arrest anyone who is caught with open containers of alcohol.
