Oh, SantaCon: Harbinger of puke, pee, bar brawls and a bro battalion in red hats descending upon Manhattan, drinking themselves into such Dionysian oblivion that it has become a source of both global mockery and existential dread. What hope is left for man when we annually transform Midtown, the center of our planet’s richest city, into a vomit-strewn hellscape of petty crimes and debauched violence, all in the name of Christmas?

But it didn’t have to be this way — this way being a 30,000-person December bar crawl in Santa suits known for immediately devolving into drunken mayhem.

In fact, it wasn’t always like that. That’s right: In the beginning, SantaCon was – dare I say – pure.

“SantaCon,” a new documentary shines a light on these early days of SantaCon, when it was just a one-off prank party of sorts organized in San Francisco in 1994 by the Cacophony Society, the same group of alternative-minded pranksters who, in their pursuit of “meaningless madness,” also accidentally planted the seeds for what became Burning Man.

Rob Schmitt, originator of the idea for SantaCon (or Santarchy, as it was initially called), John Law, who co-executed the first rendition of the event, Chris Hackett, organizer of New York’s first SantaCon (he never participated again), and the documentary’s director Seth Porges recently got together to discuss how their fun party concept grew into an international phenomenon they no longer associate with.

As part of DocNYC, “SantaCon” is screening this Thursday and streaming through Nov. 30.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So tell me, how’d it all start? Why Santa?

Rob Schmitt: I saw a postcard in my friend's bedroom of Santas playing pool. I said, “We’ve gotta do this.” I love Santa.  I belonged to a group called the Cacophony Society and I brought it to a Cacophony meeting. Everybody hated the idea. People were saying, “That’s the worst idea ever.”

Chris Hackett:  If you saw a postcard of dogs playing pool, this would've been a very different event.

Schmitt: It would be a totally different event. Everybody would be sniffing each others’ butts.

Tell me about the first ever SantaCon, or Santarchy as you called it then.

Schmitt: Santa is such an icon, it hit home right away. Nobody had ever seen a bunch of Santas together. When people saw the Santas – we only had 38 the first night – 34 of them got on a Ferris wheel. The people at the carnival were so happy to see so many Santas.

Seth Porges: It created this moment of disruption, where people just stopped and went, “Wait, what is this?” When you do it again and again and again, that novelty goes away until all that's left is an excuse to dress in red and get drunk.

Hackett:  What made SantaCon weird the first time was no one knew what to expect from a whole bunch of Santas. Because you never see a bunch of Santas, you only see one. Now people know what to expect.

Porges: The early SantaCons, a lot of it was about taking Santa and going to the most absurd and unexpected places you would never see Santa. Like, you don't see Santa running down a beach. You don't see Santa invade a department store.

Hackett:  It's like, “I had the weirdest thing happen to me: Santa came up to me and gave me a pack of cigarettes wrapped in pornography and was drinking out of a Lysol bottle. I don't know what happened, but it was weird and it was kind of interesting.” And then they move on with their lives – they're not scarred by it, but they're impacted a little.

Porges: There's definitely also some subtext in the movie about this last gasp of pre-9/11 New York. 1998 New York. How chill everybody was. How you could run through the streets of New York and do crazy stuff and rather than being filled with anger or aggression or an assumption that somebody's just doing a TikTok stunt, people's eyes are looking ahead and not down at a phone, and there's an openness, a willingness to engage with the world that maybe is gone just a little bit today.

Am I wrong in seeing something rather "Purge"-like about SantaCon?

John Law:: Most major cultures going back to antiquity have events maybe a couple times a year where the peasants are allowed to go run around, get drunk, smash things a little bit, and just go nuts for a week or so. It's a safety release valve. It's something that's required for societies, and the lizard people who run these societies understand that. So they give us this release option.

Schmitt: The guy that started Improv Everywhere was influenced by seeing Santarchy.

Law:  Importantly, it's not about money. Even though there are some people nowadays with SantaCon charging money, it's not about money. It was never about money. It was about interacting with other people, creating our own reality.

Hackett:  I've been thinking about SantaCon lately as part of a continuum of a time when people were taking public space and just saying, I'm going to take this, I'm gonna do my thing. I'm gonna do my big spectacle, my big thing of wonder with a lot of people.

Porges: One of the reasons I think SantaCon is so popular today and why tens of thousands of people go to the New York one is there's just hunger for opportunities to let loose, for opportunities to anonymously let whatever is inside of you burning to get out.

Hackett: At SantaCon, you get to be double anonymous: You’re wearing a costume, and you're wearing the same costume as everyone else.

And how’d it lose its way?

Law: From our involvement it took on a life of its own. The important part of it being that it's unmediated. It's not controlled by the government, it's not controlled by business, not controlled by any particular individuals, and that gives it some value.

Porges: I think one of the lessons I pulled from hanging out with the creators of SantaCon is that they basically say, all right, when this thing moves on and it's no longer for us, we can do something else instead. I think the big lesson is to not get caught up in just trying to repeat the hits. Things change. They grow. You let them change. You let them grow. You accept that they're outside of your control. At the end of the day, you just have to go out and make something new.

Hackett: People are hungry for experience. They want to take over the streets, they want to do the thing, they want to matter in some way. They wanna be part of the New York that they were promised. SantaCon, sadly, seems to be the only thing that's giving them that opportunity.