Thousands in costumes revel at festive SantaCon

That’s welcome news to Lower East Side residents who say they bear the brunt of the onslaught, with drunken revelers urinating, puking and passing out throughout the neighborhood.

Christmas is approaching and for NYC a major infamous event is taking place each year – SantaCon is coming to town. This year, they released their route days ahead of time, got a permit to assemble at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park and even agreed to tweet police advice about pedestrian safety.

“We had a safe event for everybody, and I’m happy about that because in the past, SantaCon has had a bad reputation”, said Virgil, whose bar hosted more than 1,000 Santas and elves as an official SantaCon destination.

Still, some officials are seeing red.

The agency and SantaCon said they already planned to do what was asked.

SantaCon – related events in more than 300 cities, with New York City’s the biggest – traces its roots to a San Francisco meet-up in 1994 that parodied yuletide consumerism.

“We’re in the process of an image change, and we are hoping we can do something that would be much more family friendly”, Jim Glaser, one of the organizers of the pub crawl told The New York Times. But the backlash appears to have eased as organizers have worked to re-brand the event as a good-spirited fundraiser for charity.

“There is no Christmas parade in NY”, he added.

Police logged a total of two arrests and 85 summonses for disorderly conduct, open alcohol containers and other offenses during SantaCon in 2012 and 2013, when some Santas got into street fights seen in online videos.

Last yr’s SantaCon in New York City coincided with road demonstrations towards police violence sparked by killings of unarmed black males, complicating safety issues.

SantaCon is going to take place this Saturday, December 12.

“I’m just here to have fun and be a part of something”, said a Santa-suited Terance McNamara, 25, of Hoboken, New Jersey.

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