Way back in 1998, the Cacophony Society, an anarchic group of neo-dadaist pranksters (slogan: “you may already be a member!”), brought their annual December event to NYC.

They called it SantaCon, and billed it as a "not-for-profit, nonpolitical, non-religious demented Santa Claus convention.”

I attended that first NYC SantaCon, wherein about two hundred of us in cheap Santa suits walked Fifth Avenue, caroling badly, and handing out candy canes and good cheer to the children (and adults) who were inevitably thrilled to stumble across a giant roving pack of jovial Clauses.

But somewhere in the nearly two decades since, things went badly wrong. What started as cheeky performance art metastasized into, as the Village Voice described it, "a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.”

Or, as Gothamist summarized, “SantaCon steadily devolved from cleverly subversive to barely tolerable to 'time to lock yourself in your apartment for the day.'"

This past weekend, when Jess and I popped out of a subway in Union Square, inadvertently deep in the midst of SantaCon 2016, I couldn’t help but cringe. While I’d been proud to attend that first event, the drunken mayhem going on all around us just made me embarrassed for everyone involved.

What happened? In short, New Jersey and Long Island. Per the LA Times, "some see SantaCon as a way for people who live in the suburbs to come to the city and ruin the weekend.” Indeed, at least by visual stereotype, this year’s SantaCon crowd was about as bridge-and-tunnel as you could possibly get.

In short, this is why we can’t have nice things. Though the weekend experience does lead me to a small proposal for fellow snotty New Yorkers: perhaps, instead of fighting against Trump’s wall, we should just be lobbying him to build one a little closer to home.