SantaCon NYC Bar Crawl Canceled Due to COVID-19

SantaCon along Delancey St., December 2015
Santa Claus isn’t coming to town, after all.
The novel coronavirus also came for SantaCon. The annual day of debauchery was canceled just like everything else in 2020. According to the official SantaCon website, all of the reindeer “Got the ‘rona,” scrapping the usual shitshow of costumed, drunken revelers parading around the city.
“Once it became clear that the U.S. was going to be significantly affected by the pandemic, we decided that it would be in the best interest of both the city as well as our Santas to postpone the event for this year,” a representative told The Daily News.
For many neighborhood denizens, the cancelation is certainly a welcomed (albeit temporary) reprieve. The tradition has wreaked havoc across the Lower East Side for years, always with a trail of vomit, urine, and yelling. More recently, the neighborhood was omitted from the official party route as local opposition snowballed each year.