Where Did the Elf on the Shelf “Tradition” Really Come From?
It started in 2005. “The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition” had humble beginnings; 5,000 copies of a children’s story that explains how Santa Claus knows who is naughty and nice. Since then, “Elf on the Shelf” has had a yearly growth of about 149 percent. The friendly little elf who watches over your children is everywhere now, with more than 11 million of him being sold across the world. He’s even earned an enormous place in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.
How did this pervasive legend begin? The three founders, Carol Aebersold and her twin daughters Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts, relate how Elf on the Shelf began as a simplistic and whimsical family tradition of ‘Fisbee’ the elf reporting to Santa Claus at night and arriving back at a different position in their house the next day. None of them could have anticipated the international sensation of it: the multi-million dollar sales, the embrace by Facebook and Youtube creators, an animated series on CBS, and its establishment as a nationally-recognized Christmas tradition. Given the history of Christmas customs, though, perhaps its success is not so unexpected.
Where did this whole idea come from, anyway?
The monitoring of children’s behavior and doling out corresponding rewards or punishments during Christmas-time has a long and varied tradition. In Central Europe there is the centuries-old pair of Krampus, the demon who heavily punishes badly-behaved children, and Saint Nicholas, who gives gifts to the good. In Germany, Knecht Ruprecht and Belsnickel take the place of Krampus, and La Befana has the role of Santa Claus in Italy. Many American children are aware of the idea that Santa gives children who misbehave a lump of coal instead of presents, a concept which developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. It should come as no surprise, then, that Christian parents might take to the Elf on the Shelf, another omnipresent being that observes and curtails their children’s misbehavior.
Under pressure…
And taken to it they have. The Elf has taken social media by a storm, with parents posting idea lists, elf messages, and picture after picture after picture of their elf’s positions on Pinterest, Facebook, and other sites. The comment section on an Elf on the Shelf page of the blog “Crystal & Co.: your mommy resources and solutions” provides some insight into how parents feel about this widespread phenomenon: “We may be the only people we know that do not do the elf,” notes M. “This is adorable, but I have to say that all the elf on the shelf FB posts make me glad not to have kids!” says S. “After the last few months we have had with our kids Im sure we will need to print one of these [behavior reports from the elf]… we had to do this last year too. It really helped their behavior,” claims C. “You did such an amazing job of bringing the elf back to your home another year and giving him an extra way to make the holidays special!” says J. The joy in bringing the Elf on the Shelf to their household is clear for many; the kids are delighted by the creativity and attracted by magic of it. But the storm of elaborate planning for each night of December becomes a point of pressure for many young parents, who are pushed into it by a wave of commenters, bloggers, articles, and posts telling them that if they don’t do it, they are withholding the experience from their kids. One young mother laments how after weeks of reminding herself to move the elf to a slightly different place for the night, her youngest “sullenly told [her] about how his friends’ elves did cooler stuff”. In other words, if you don’t direct intricate scenes with your elf each night and completely engage your kids with the performance, you are a bad parent.
The social media theatre
Parents don’t just choreograph their elves for their kids’ enjoyment, though — they present it to a bigger audience on Facebook, Pinterest, and the general blogosphere. In fact, the actual execution of the Elf on the Shelf’s movement and the subsequent posting of its pictures have become so connected as to be inseparable. As one ‘Dynamom’ writer quips for the Huffington Post, “It’s that time again, the time when the cleverest, craftiest moms and dads dust off their favorite Elf on the Shelf Pinterest boards and create magic for their Facebook friends — I mean, their kids! Of course, their kids.” Some parents even take to posting messages they wrote that they claim to be from the elf to their children. This practice seems especially odd; most people’s five year-olds aren’t on Pinterest, so who is the post for? It seems clear that parents are searching for recognition from other parents, wanting to feel a moment of fulfillment of parental responsibilities. But why do parents today feel so insecure about their abilities? Surely some of it comes from the common struggle of balancing your parental obligations, work, and emotional wellbeing that always comes with being a parent. A larger part of it is likely fed by the additional societal and social pressures that come from the relatively new prevalence of social media. Social media informs many hours of most of our lives. It makes it very easy to compare ourselves to others and society’s standards. Having an account on social media demands that you present yourself in an appealing way to gain favor — and it becomes harder to escape that notion when for hours every day you are surrounded by others performing their most perfect self. The instant communication on social media allows for people to encourage or pressure you into doing what they do. Some parents are simply deterred in participating in it by this, but others feel they have no space to opt out, instead caving to the pressure and using the platform to project a confidence they may not feel. But those who defend Elf on the Shelf don’t see it as anything to do with peer pressure — just as a way to keep the magic of Christmas alive. The creativity and festivity of it can make the holiday special for both children and parents.
Last year, I babysat two little kids from my synagogue. After playing with their toys for a while, we sat down on the couch and started watching videos from Youtube Kids on their family’s iPad with the autoplay function on. Eventually Youtube led us to a video titled “Secret elf on the shelf meeting for thanksgiving!” posted by the Elf on the Shelf Youtube channel. It features a woman discovering a meeting of upwards of 50 elves behind doors covered with wrapping paper, who asks her viewers to “comment below if you see your elf.”
The video has 2.3 million views and 8,931 comments: “My 6 elfs snowman snowflake winter cold Santa and rudolph are there” says A. “Jolly?!?!?!?!?!?!?is that youuuuuuuuuu ” exclaims E. “My elf names snowflake she’s a girl and can I get a like plzz ” asks C. Another video on the channel is titled “Elf on the Shelf MOVING!” and contains an elf moving its head towards the camera, with 576,125 views and 12,522 comments. The channel has 50,841 subscribers as of October 10, 2018.
Kids may not see their parents’ Facebook account, but they are on social media, and most definitely are on Youtube. Children of all ages today — including toddlers — are passively consuming all kinds of media produced through Youtube, including everything related to Elf on the Shelf, from Elf on the Shelf moving compilations, to “Elf on the Shelf is Real! Don’t Touch”, to “Elf on the Shelf: Rap Battle”.
Sometimes, children aren’t just passive viewers but are also part of the content. ‘AdventureswithMe’ is a family vlog channel with 15,300 subscribers and a playlist titled “Elf on the Shelf” with 9 videos. The first video is titled “Don’t Try to Fool the Elf on the Shelf!”, and opens with the father filming his son’s reaction as he reads him the story of the elf. The dialogue for the video is clearly scripted, but is revealing nonetheless. The Elf on the Shelf™ book reads:
I tell him [Santa] if you have been good or bad,
The news of the day makes him happy or sad.
A push or a shove I’ll report to “The Boss,”
But small acts of kindness will not be a loss.
“You know what this means, right?” asks the father. “The elf is gonna watch you, so you better behave.” The son responds: “What if the elf doesn’t see me do it?” “Um… then I guess the elf can’t report it to Santa. But I can tell it to the elf, and he’ll tell it to Santa,” the father says to the son. He thinks about that for a moment. “What if you don’t see it?” “Well… I hope that doesn’t happen, but I don’t know what the elf can do then,” says the father. The conclusion, to the son and to the many other children who are given an elf, must be obvious: if no one sees me do it, it’s as if it didn’t happen. The issue with this mindset is that it provides a false motivation. Kindness should not be done only for someone’s approval, or the expectation of material reward; and life can’t be lived entirely under someone’s watchful eye. The message of the video is quite different, though. The son thinks he can get away with bad grades if he puts the elf in a box outside, but by the end it is made clear the the elf was always watching. “the elf sees you everywhere and knows everything you do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ” warns G. “He can see you anywhere”, assures L.
If you search ‘elf on the shelf’ on Google, one of the first frequently asked questions that comes up is, “What do you do if you touch an elf on the shelf?” The answer given by the official website says that by touching the elf, you deplete the elf’s magic and must send a note apologizing to it or Santa immediately. Children must accept that they cannot move or touch the doll; must accept that the elf watches them at all times and reports everything to the authority of Santa Claus. “This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination,” digital technology professor Laura Pinto writes, “The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play.” The relationship between the Elf’s function and government surveillance is clearly analogous, and professors like Laura Pinto realize this. “It sounds humorous,” Pinto says, “but if we argue that a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.” With issues of privacy becoming more prevalent with government interceptions of phone calls and text messages and corporations digitally tracking and profiling smartphone usage, I would encourage those who use Elf on the Shelf to consider this perspective, far-fetched as Pinto’s analysis may seem at first. Just as parents perform the Elf on the Shelf to their friends and children, their kids perform a certain way to satisfy the external authority of the Elf on the Shelf and Santa Claus. “Small acts of kindness” and refraining from “a push or a shove” may seem like progress, but without empathetic reasoning behind them, children are less likely to make these judgements independently.
“The Boss”
I’ve known Santa wasn’t real since before I entered preschool. I wasn’t alone in this; most non-Christian families don’t bother making a story for their kids about the jolly old fellow in the chimney who tells them whether they’ve been bad or good each winter. However, being in a majority-Christian school, that wasn’t the case for the rest of my classmates. My mom made sure I knew that even though the other students believed in something that wasn’t real, I mustn’t tell them that — but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They were utterly convinced. Christmas-time gave rise to many kids sharing Santa-sighting stories, which always left me baffled. How could they believe something so fervently that was so obviously fake?
It didn’t help that the culture around me seemed to encourage this kind of belief. I remember a day spent in first-grade class watching the 2004 movie “The Polar Express”, which seemed set on framing the lack of belief in Santa as some huge loss or hole in people’s spirit. Frankly, that part was pretty offensive to this little cynical Jewish kid. In fact, there were multiple parts in that movie that struck me as off. One scene in particular that stuck in my mind for years took place in the elf command center of the North Pole. The room was filled with computer screens, names, and towns; on every computer screen was a child whose every move was being supervised. “We got a troublemaker now!” an elf exclaims as a ‘Naughty!’ sign flashes and alarms blared. It’s a kid who stuck gum in his sister’s hair. “Nothing for Christmas here,” the elf sighs, and cancels the kid’s presents in one ruthless sweep. Santa’s rules. On one of the screens, you can see a newborn baby being monitored, watched for behavior less than a year into its life. I couldn’t understand how people could believe in this figure who held such harsh black-and-white judgement over their lives. It was either be perfect, or get nothing.
But I could be wrong about all of this. I haven’t grown up with Santa or Santa’s rules in my life, only some vague impressions from those around me. I’ve only held on to the question: Why is he held so close to the heart of so many kids?
The Elf on the Shelf book emphasizes the kindness of Santa Claus, and never has him or the elf threaten to take anything away from the child. The elf’s motivation is to be able to deliver good news and gift requests to Santa to please him. In most families and traditions, Santa has a fatherly presence; he is mainly a gift-giver, not only a source of discipline. Discipline is important for kids when it comes from a point of love and clear communication, and tools like these elf behavior reports help with that. Moms like Brittany Mease find it useful to maintain their kids’ behavior through the elf (and, by extension, Santa Claus). The complex setup of the elf demands a lot of her, but she “sucks it up every year and does it to see those precious smiles on [her] beautiful children’s faces.” The gift-giving and games that the Elf on the Shelf can bring to a household can make Christmas into a holiday of fun and enjoyment. The magic of Santa Claus allows for an appreciation of the mystery of the world to be brought into children’s lives without religious baggage. Says one of The Elf on the Shelf’s founders, “It really breaks my heart to have people think it’s creepy. That is not the intent, and that is not the way we celebrated the tradition in our house. The way we want children and parents to look at the elf is: Who doesn’t want a best friend who is going to Santa to tell him how great you are?”
There’s something about all this, though, that still strikes an odd tone with me; and I’m not alone in that feeling. We are all familiar with those iconic lines from ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town”: “He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake/He knows if you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness’ sake!” One local mom says that, even though she arranges the Elf on the Shelf for her daughter, she’s taken the surveillance element out of it, skipping the relevant pages in the picture book that came with the toy. Her neighbor, though, uses the elf to restrict her children’s behavior, telling them that they won’t get presents if they misbehaved. Another parent “changed the game so it wouldn’t scare the child” after the daughter woke up crying because she was being watched by the elf. A local teenager told me how her parents would talk about Santa “bringing her something big” when she behaved herself as a kid, and how they would remind her “Santa is watching, he’s not going to be happy,” when she lied to them. She was worried she would lose her presents. Her neighbors used to use the Elf on the Shelf, she remembered. “Whenever the kids would act up, they would tell them that the elf on the shelf was listening… Their kids never asked to move it around, which is odd, but I guess they were more focused on the presents.”
“To me,” says a local mom, “Santa Claus giving gifts — all that stuff about getting the best gifts, the most gifts — contradicts the Christmas story. Mary wasn’t chosen by God because of her status or how much money she had, but because of her devotion.” Somewhere, in between Santa Claus and the Elf on the Shelf, we seem to have lost the devotion behind Christmas, and replaced it with gifts. Santa Claus is a kind and giving man, but I don’t think emulating him is the main message children are taking away from his legend. The main reason why kids are taught to like Santa is because he brings them gifts. Maybe he puts standards in place in kid’s lives that guide them towards being a better person, but I would argue that they becomes superficial when the main thing guiding them is a monetary reward, or the threat of punishment. This becomes even more relevant under the watch of the elf, who changes children’s behavior through the direct pressure of being a near-constant presence. As parent blogger Emma Waverman so succinctly put it, “It makes the motivation to behave something that’s external. If I’m not around or if the elf is not around, do they act crazy?”
We live in a society which correlates moral purity with monetary wealth. Those who have financial wealth are said to have earned it every step of the way. People in power need to justify the power disparity. This justification has roots in that Puritan ideology that wealth and political power were sequestered to the deserving, and the division of power should not be questioned, because God willed it to be that way. This ethical framework has carried into the standards set by the American Dream; the economic systems and daily lives of those living in America today. There is a pressure to show love and reward good behavior with monetary gifts. The issue becomes when existing monetary wealth is assumed to be the result of worthiness, and poverty assumed to be the result of depravity. It is unfair to hoist that worldview upon children and parents. Parenthood should not amount to the question of whether you bought enough Elves on the Shelf ™ for each of your children, or gave them the most expensive gifts, or sent them to the most expensive colleges. Parenthood is more than that; it is growing a person, showing them how to develop a set of values that they use to interact with the world and other people. We all want our children to be compassionate, to be creative, hard-working, and analytical. How can we do that if we don’t allow them to develop a reasoning behind their actions beyond avoiding punishment?