The fourth grader arrived home with big news on Tuesday: The elf had finally arrived.
An Elf on the Shelf, that is—more specifically, the Elf on a Shelf that, each December, haunts Mr. Payne’s classroom, where Belle endures daily lessons in social studies and language arts.
Perhaps you are not familiar with these creatures? The legend, sparked in 2005 with the launch of the very successful Elf on the Shelf © product line (doll, book, keepsake box), is as follows.
Santa—perhaps stretched thin by population growth, old age, or both—has taken to dispatching an army of elves to assist him in monitoring children’s niceness or naughtiness. These elves are about a foot tall, with bodies of red felted wool and wearing conical red hats and a sort of beatific smirk frozen on their plastic faces.
They arrive on or about Thanksgiving, perched somewhere high and out of the way. (On a shelf, perhaps.) All day long, they sit motionless, noting all that transpires around them. At night, they fly to the North Pole, make their reports, then return by dawn to take station on a different shelf (or wherever), so as to get a new angle on the subjects of their monitoring. The book that each elf arrives with—part origin myth, part owner’s manual—advises children not to touch these little creatures, lest their magic be lost and they turn into the inanimate objects they otherwise appear to be.
Each morning, children have the fun of searching out their elf’s new vantage point; each evening, the grownups have yet another important task to remember, lest Christmas be ruined.
* * *
Although I look at this new tradition with something of an arched eyebrow, I can’t say I mind it much. It’s mildly annoying but mostly worth it for the enjoyment the children find in it, like pretty much all holiday traditions.
Yes, Elves on Shelves are a commercial product and a rather manipulative one at that (on which more later), but then again, doesn’t our current conception of Santa Claus owe a lot to a 1931 Coca-Cola marketing campaign?
Every year, it’s easy to find a lazy op-ed writer lamenting that elves on shelves train children to “accept the surveillance state,” but such concerns strike me as overblown, at least in any household that would otherwise keep the Santa tradition.
The song has always told children that “Santa knows… when [they’ve] been good or bad,” after all. How Santa was coming by this knowledge prior to the introduction of Elves on Shelves was never made clear, but doesn’t the idea of being invisibly monitored by Santa, all the way from the North Pole, sound a lot like the satellites, drones, AI, and other mysterious tools of the surveillance state (not to mention surveillance capitalism) looking over our shoulders even now?
In this light, the idea of using human elfin assets for intelligence gathering can seem refreshingly old fashioned.
* * *
If you’re paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Mr. Payne’s elf—let’s call him Fred—was late this year. Mr. Payne, a retired soldier for whom teaching is a second career, advised his charges that Fred would be delayed because he had “joined the military” and was completing training.
It seemed possible that boot camp might be punishment for past transgressions, because Fred has a record of not insignificant mischief. His hijinks during Christmas seasons past have included not only casual mess-making and prankish rearrangements of classroom furnishings but also “trying to eat” the classroom guinea pig and, in an escapade that brought him to the attention of the entire student body, kidnapping all of the school’s other classroom elves and “hanging them up” in the school office.
The combination of Fred’s tardiness and reputation for transgression left the children giddy with anticipation this year. Each morning, as Belle packed her lunch before heading to the bus stop, she wondered aloud if that would be the day of Fred’s debut and what he might get up to, if so.
When Fred finally arrived last Tuesday, he was indeed in uniform, but this was the only sign of the good order and discipline so prized in the armed forces. He kicked things off that first morning by wrapping Mr. Payne’s chair and workstation in garlands of green tinsel. On Wednesday, he TP’ed the classroom and scrawled a mocking note on the chalkboard in his tiny and—as Belle emphasized—atrociously poor handwriting. The rest of the week, he seems to have been content to simply perch and watch. Belle hypothesizes he may have been getting ready for something big this week, but that shoe has yet to drop.
* * *
I have to ask: Is Santa supposed to be okay with his field representative setting such a poor example? Given the expectation that children be on their best behavior at this time of year, Fred’s pranks strike me as having something in common with a zoo-goer taunting the animals in the cages. Then again, maybe the elves are told to behave this way to help the children vicariously blow off steam without risking their nice-list placements as they enter the home stretch.
It seems more likely to be the latter, now that I think about it, because classroom duty seems as though it would be reserved for the more experienced and qualified ranks of elves. Not only do classroom elves get evenings and weekends off, after all, but they are also often the first representatives of elfdom that children encounter and so serve as recruiters for families that might not independently decide to sign up for home monitoring.
That's how we ended up with our elf, anyway. Belle first encountered an Elf on a Shelf in her kindergarten classroom. As Thanksgiving of her first grade year approached, she began hoping out loud that one of the things would soon arrive at our house, and Petra and I were faced with a conundrum. We were of course committed to supporting our children’s belief in the overall Santa story as long as possible. Now we had this teacher, whom Belle considered a figure of trust and authority, presenting these elves as an integral element in that story. What might Belle—who was no doubt also hearing from friends that their houses were customarily graced by elves—be forced to conclude if our house never was?
In the face of this diabolical marketing ingenuity, we felt we had no choice but to buckle. Our elf—let’s call him Kevin—arrived on time that year and has been integral to Oakes family holiday observances for three Christmas seasons.
And counting?
* * *
How long can this—the elf, Santa, all of it—last? Petra and I have observed to each other that, most likely, this will be the final Christmas season when the Oakes household contains a believer. Soon, to put it in the terms of The Polar Express, none of us will any longer be able to hear the bells.
Axl’s belief dissipated early. The same year when Belle was encountering her first Elf on a Shelf, in kindergarten, second-grade Axl was starting to compile evidence against the Santa story.
He’d noticed, for one thing, that the Santa on whose lap we plopped him and his sister at the YMCA after each year’s Downtown Christmas Parade wore a fake beard.
Then, once Christmas came and went, he compared notes with a classmate and learned that, while his presents from Santa had all been addressed in block lettering, that other household’s Santa loot had been addressed in cursive.
Finally, he wasn’t sure what to make of certain discrepancies between the list he’d mailed off to Santa and what he actually received on Christmas morning. Interestingly, the sticking point seems not to have been that he didn’t get everything on his list—we’d briefed him on that possibility, of course—but that he got something he not only hadn’t asked for but hadn’t even known existed.
That was the year that, for reasons I can no longer recall, we decided Santa would give each child a lucky rabbit’s foot, apparently thereby shooting ourselves in our own. Both children understandably found these perplexing, if not horrifying, when they unwrapped them on Christmas morning. Belle moved on, but apparently Axl just couldn’t stop wondering where the hell the allegedly magical and omniscient Santa had gotten the idea he might want such a thing.
A few weeks after that Christmas, as I was driving both kids home from the YMCA after-school program, Belle was in the middle of saying something about Santa when Axl started to say something skeptical. I sharply told him to shut it and that we’d talk about whatever was on his mind later.
That night, after I’d tucked him in to bed, he asked me point-blank whether Santa was real.
After a little hemming and hawing, I realized that there was no salvaging his belief. I conceded the truth, then explained what I hoped to convince him was good news. Now that he had stopped believing in Santa, I told him, he was Santa, along with everyone else who has outgrown the story. It was now his job, I explained, to at least make sure he never undermined another child’s belief and, from time to time, to look for chances to prop up the whole edifice. He’d enjoyed believing, I pointed out; surely he wouldn’t want to take that away from someone else.
I took pains to hammer this point home because, frankly, I was worried that the prospect of wrecking his little sister’s belief might prove irresistible in the white heat of inter-sibling combat. I wanted him to understand how far off the table and out of bounds he should consider that option. Tear the heads off her dolls, call her a “disease,” remind her that “Belle” rhymes with “hell,” etc., but—whatever you do—do not tell her there is no such thing as Santa.
If all he had done was keep his mouth shut and resist that temptation, I’d have been happy. So imagine my exultation when, as the next holiday season got underway, he insisted on being the one to move Kevin to his new perch each night. He’s been an upstanding member of the crowd-sourced Santa support crew ever since, and I love what that says about his essential goodness of spirit.
No doubt partly due to her brother’s support and possibly, by this point, at least partially through force of will, Belle still believes. Just as capable of noticing fake beards as her brother, she has apparently decided that, just because the local Santas are counterfeit, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real one beavering away at the North Pole, too busy to be dropping in on every backwater’s half-assed Christmas parade or VFD pancake feast.
Leading up to this year’s season, there were one or two moments when some tiny flicker of more comprehensive doubt seemed to enter her mind, but now that the decorations are up and there is an elf to find every morning, she seems to be all in.
Axl was clearly compartmentalizing a little during his last season as a believer; perhaps Belle is, too. Now and then the smooth surface of her faith shows cracks. Certainly it is hard to imagine that she really thinks our little plush elf is a living being capable of flying back and forth to the North Pole each night but also content to sit as immobile as a stone all day long. Faith looks for reasons to believe, not reasons to doubt, I suppose—and, to be fair, a flight like that would tend to wear one out.
When I confirmed Axl in his doubts, I was worried that he would be upset about the deception, but he took the news well and mainly seemed proud to have figured it out. I was proud he had, too. It spoke to an analytical ability and self-sufficient confidence in his own conclusions that will stand him in good stead later in life.
That’s not to say I judge Belle poorly for not yet having done likewise. The two children are very different from each other, and Belle has always been more open to games of make-believe than her brother. Especially as children get older, there is more going on with Santa belief than mere gullibility or uncritical thinking, neither of which afflicts Belle in other contexts. The ability to embrace and inhabit a construct of the imagination is a useful skill, too, and Belle’s gifts in this regard are also a kind of strength.
All we can do is wait, watch, enjoy—and try not to forget to move that damn elf before turning in each night.
