The Elf on the Shelf is a spurious and coercive ‘tradition’ that should be shelved forthwith
HIS is a call to action. Many of our Christmas traditions have gritted teeth attached, one of them being Coca Cola owning and relentlessly pushing the visual of a beaming retro Santa at us. Nothing to be done about it, though.
Nonetheless, one Christmas tradition of relatively recent vintage should not be accepted and allowed to bed down into the culture of the season.
We have an opportunity to stop it in its tracks and extirpate it, and we must band together to form an extirpation union.
This particular stinker began 10 years ago,with the self-publication of a children’s book by an American and her daughter.
Now, right there is the beginning of a wider problem: The widely-held conviction, rarely supported by evidence, that everybody has a children’s book in them.
Setting that to one side, the fact is that this woman and her daughter wrote a book. In rhyme. Don’t ask why it’s in rhyme. It just is.
Now, the book was entitled The Elf on the Shelf and concerned an elf on Santa’s workforce who got sent out to spy on children to ensure they’d better not pout, they’d better not cry, they’d better not shout and so on, coming up to Christmas.
This elfish Special Branch officer, this soft toy member of the Stasi, would sit on a shelf in a child’s home during Advent, its beady eye fixed on the toddler’s every move, and when night fell would high-tail it off to the North Pole to inform on the kid to Mr Claus.
Given what we know of Mr Claus, we might have expected him to lift the elf off its repulsive little pointy-up shoes and tell it not to be a nasty informer, adding that the elf’s annual review would reflect Mr Claus’ disappointment that the elf would so mis-read North Pole corporate culture that it would think the Clauses would be impressed by this kind of leaking.
However, according to the book published in 2005, Santa must have been preoccupied (cutbacks maybe).
He failed to show principled leadership on this issue. Instead, he listened to the elf’s report and allowed it to inform his thinking about the munificence of his delivery to the child involved.
Nay, he went further. The elf was permitted to leave the house which had given it warm, welcoming shelter, and sneak off to the North Pole every night in order to grass on its owner.
This elf was so focused on its malign task that it didn’t concentrate on the minor details, so when it came back to the house, it wouldn’t remember to sit in the same place on the same shelf, but would plant itself on any available shelf or surface.
Because it didn’t sit in the same place on its return from its sell-out mission, the child could learn from its parents (and we have questions about THEM, too, the miserable meanies) about the elf’s nocturnal nastiness, thereby ensuring good behaviour on the part of the misfortune kid until Santa delivered, after which, if the kid had its wits about it, all bets would be off and delinquency could flourish.
The Elf on the Shelf became a hit and stayed a hit.
Not only that, but a soft toy industry grew up around the concept, enabling parents to buy a boxed version of the elf and place it in different locations in their home in the run-up to Christmas to terrify and intimidate their offspring.
For a while, the Elf on the Shelf was an American fad, and all decent Irish citizens who heard about it hoped that it would stay there, but no. It has come to Ireland and is increasingly popular with parents.
One parent who this year invested in the Elf on the Shelf told me yesterday about her experience with it.
Her lively, argumentative child, aged 3¾, was introduced to the elf and the initial contact was reasonably friendly, although it was clear the child was not going to abandon their loyalty to their teddy and substitute the elf.
Which among us, even all these many years into adulthood, would abandon our teddy?
Not that the child was going to get much chance to get up-close and personal with the elf, because, as we have learned, the elf has to be put on a shelf.
The following morning, the elf was on a different shelf and the child was coming to terms with the realisation that his parents had introduced a fifth columnist into his life.
At this point, his parents went off to work and the child-minder took over.
We must assume that the childminder, like Mr Claus, got a bit preoccupied during the day, because when the father came home, he noticed a severe absence of elf on the designated shelf, and the childminder, before departing, shrugged when asked where it had gone.
The father then did a search, and located the elf, head-down in a jam jar containing muddied water, usually used by his son for painting minor works of fridge art.
Dad removed the elf from its watery grave, only to find that, in addition to a general and total soddenness, the elf’s head was at an unnatural angle. He brought the elf to his small son, enquiringly.
“I choked elf,” the child responded, matter-of-factly, and you can identify with that. He did insert a syllable before the word “Elf” beginning with F and ending with K, but we’ll gloss over that. It’s the parents I blame.
The father, as is common with good fathers faced with paternal realities, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Partly because he had never been a big fan of the elfish spy approach anyway, he interred the thing respectfully in the wheelie bin and gave an edited version of what the AA would call “the incident” to his wife, minimising the double murder complications of its demise.
But he’s looking at his toddler since then with a mixture of admiration and foreboding.
The foreboding is derived from fear that doing away so comprehensively with an offending elf may be the precursor to other actions and that the kid may be subject to an ASBO before he goes to school.
The point is that this child was subjected to cruel and unusual provocation.
All children suffer a variation of this, leading up to Yuletide. Indeed, the nephew of a friend, who is around the same age as the elf- murderer was heard last week to observe “I sick of Santa watching me”.
But generalised warnings about lesser presents resulting from poorer behaviour can be lived with.
A parentally-purchased spy in the camp is a step too far. Choking is too good for this globe-trotting malicious informer.
Down with him, I say, and let us, from this day forward, band together to stifle the growth of this spurious and coercive ‘tradition’.
God bless us, everyone. Not including the elf on the shelf.
