Naughty List: SantaCon 2023 Returns, Lack Of Charity Giving Revealed

MIDTOWN, NY — Hordes of red-suited boozed up Santas are set to destroy New York City this weekend in a show of debauchery.

The annual spectacle of hordes of booze-sodden Kris Kringles bar-crawling across the city will return Saturday at 10 a.m.

In addition to the sometimes over-served Santas flooding the streets, the actual organization behind the SantaCon event has been revealed to long under-serve the charities they often boast of supporting, according to a new report from Gothamist.

Only 20 percent of the $1.4 million raised by SantaCon programing between 2014 to 2022 went to registered non-profits, despite their claims of delivering "over $1.1 million to charitable causes" on their website, according to Gothamist.

“To the extent that they’re doing something charitable, it’s not what people think it is,” Brian Mittendorf, the H.P. Wolfe chair in accounting at Ohio State University told Gothamist. “The money going to their targeted charities is minuscule as a percentage of their budget.”

So where did the rest go?

Gothamist, along with three outside experts in non-profit accounting who helped them analyze their tax documents, found that over 30 percent of that supposed charitable fundraising went to groups and persons associated with Burning Man — which is sort of like the summertime SantaCon.

Around $17,500 was lost in crypto investments in 2018 — totaling about a third of their charitable giving that year, Gothamist writes.

And nearly 60 percent went towards SantaCon's operating expenses — over $830,000 — a staggering amount for a group with no full-time employees who put on one seasonal event a year.

“Charities play fast and loose with how they account these things all the time,” an a Notre Dame University Law School professor who specializes in nonprofit regulation, Lloyd Mayer, told Gothamist.

But nothing at this point can hold fast the city's walls against the invading hordes.

Lucky, their plans are public, giving bystanders an upper hand this weekend.

Starting from Broadway and 40th Street, the Christmas cheer will spread to over 50 locations across Manhattan —namely Midtown, East Village and Chelsea — according to the event's map.

And Santas are reminded to heed the five "Fs of SantaCon."

• Don't F*** with kids
• Don't F*** with cops
• Don't F*** with bar staff
• Don't F*** with NYC
• Don't F*** with Santa's Charity Mission

Despite those rules, New Yorkers have decidedly mixed (no, not like the drinks) feelings about SantaCon and its ho-ho-hedonism.

Horror stories about the event are legion, such as this sadly representative tale from Reddit: "My friend's son asked him 'Dad, why is Santa puking on the train?'"

Because of past mistakes, this year the MTA is also banning alcohol on all Metro-North and LIRR trains starting at 4 a.m. Saturday until noon on Sunday.

Patch last year also found that SantaCon actually does not drive a spike in 311 complaints for noise and public urination — a sign that the event either isn't as rowdy as its reputation, or that New Yorkers simply shrug off drunken shenanigans as par the course for the day.

A SantaCon ticket costs $15 and can be purchased on the event's website.

Click here to read the rest of Gothamist's SantaCon story — where even deeper connections to the desert are revealed.