To Elf or Not to Elf?

Newsflash: My Instagram feed is no longer populated solely with bowls of porridge and pictures of the Maldives. Since December 1^st, I’ve seen innumerable photos of little toy elves involved in incorrigible high jinks in the homes of many of my friends. Hashtag investigation revealed they are Elves on Shelves. If you are as puzzled as I was, don’t worry. Here is your handy need-to-know guide.

The Elf on a Shelf is an American tradition purportedly going back decades (well, on sale commercially since 2005 at least). This festive season, the elves have crossed the pond with a vengeance, eagerly waiting to leap from the shelves of John Lewis or Tesco to those in your very own home.

The premise of Elf on a Shelf is essentially an extension of Santa’s Naughty and Nice list. The little dudes are official Scouts for the big guy, and they live in your house throughout December, spying on your child’s behaviour and reporting back to Santa in the event of any misdemeanours that might warrant Christmas being cancelled. So far, so George Orwell.

It’s simple; you buy your elf in his nice red suit, take him home, and then he gets on with his surveillance and hides every morning in a different place in your house, cheekily lying in wait while your children try to find the little scamp. Except of course it’s down to you to cultivate belief in the ‘hotline to Santa’ side of things, and it’s you that will come up with all these inventive hidey-holes. Maybe not quite that simple after all.

Oh, and there’s a complicated bit about how you don’t actually own the elf, you’re just adopting him, and so the retailer who sold him to you should in fact be referred to as an Adoption Centre for Elves. And your elf is nameless, so you have to complete an online elf registration form in order to get an official Elf Adoption Certificate. Hmm. Anyone else hearing those Trumpian ‘special registration database’ alarm-bells ringing?
 

Not being a parent myself, I am constantly amazed at the lengths you have to go to in order to entertain, educate, morally guide and supervise your little ones. I assume I’d welcome any help available in the candy-cane-sugar-fest build-up to Christmas, and so initially, I admit, the idea of handing over behaviour management to a Santa Scout for a month far outweighed my concerns at any police-state undertones.

The tricky part is that in addition to an already-busy morning routine, parents have to arrange for the elf to be surprised in the middle of some exciting elfy shenanigans. Going from my Instagram evidence, this could mean he is poking about under the Christmas tree, doing a keg-stand with a bottle of Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup, or being part of a complicated skit involving some Duplo characters and a digger performing a heist on a biscuit tin.

Impressive and an absolute hoot for the kids, sure, but the level of ingenuity required to keep this up throughout December strikes me as immense. It’s the Christmas Eve palaver of planting mince-pie crumbs and sherry dregs in your living-room, not to mention shards of carefully-strewn carrot outside the front door, except you have to do it for twenty-four nights in a row.

Who will remember all the various japes your elf has got up to by the time you hit week three? You probably won’t, but you can guarantee your children will. Disappointed cries of ‘But Daddy, he’s already hidden in your sock drawer,’ must haunt the dreams of elf-owning parents across the land.

Tbh, it seems the majority of elf-shelf-enjoyment is being had by grown-ups that don’t even have children. That’s certainly the impression you get from perusing #naughtyelfonashelf threads on Twitter. (Warning: do this at your peril). These elves, getting themselves into scrapes involving Barbie strip-clubs and marshmallow hot-tubs, have clearly forgotten their brief of filling in report cards and carrier-pigeoning them back to Santa. Heck, by the number of elf-sized miniature liquor bottles being emptied, I’d say they’ve forgotten which direction the North Pole is.

I'm slightly confused by the shelf part of the whole operation, the suggestion presumably being that one’s elf is to be found each day on a different shelf. There are only 4 shelves in my entire apartment, and one of them is the high-up kitchen shelf where boxes of matches and my knife-block live. If I had kids, elves would only be invoked as part of darkly modern fairy tales that illustrate why the phrase ‘keep out of reach of children’ exists.

Are care-givers across the country spending this month endlessly debating the health and safety implications of placing an acrobatic elf on a bathroom shelf, where he’s abseiling down the hairdryer flex, or hiding in a fort made of aspirin bottles.

 

And when you run out of shelves, what then?

Actually, it seems that the shelf aspect of things isn’t all that critical. The Tesco product description of our elvish playmate suggests that he can sit ‘on the mantelpiece, table or even nestled in the Christmas tree.’ See, not a shelf in sight. Might as well call him Elf that’s Just an Elf.

My research led me to several reviews from parents who embrace the elf, and the power he wields. Notably, the single mum of 6 who praises the elf for keeping her sane and turning her children into angles (although I query the sanity and fatigue levels of someone who can’t spell angels).

However, many families are not fans of the elfdom. It’s just too fraught with stress. The playground competition of ‘their elf does more interesting stuff than our elf’ is a level of parenting critique that no-one needs. And life is far too short to ever be involved in a fight with a co-parent where your line of argument is that ‘it is completely inappropriate for Naughty the Elf to be hiding with his head poking out of the toaster.’

So, toy companies, bravo indeed. You’ve succeeded in creating the must-have toy of the festive season that sold out before December even began. I trust that you have a contingency plan for the middle of the month, when the parents and pitchforks descend, demanding that their shelves go back to being elf-free zones.

And as for the elves, I can only hope that they are receiving adequate wages and benefits for such gruelling 24-hour surveillance shift-work, and not just being fobbed off with vague whisperings of ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ and a bushel of sugarplums.


[Photo By An Errant Knight - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41334323]