Weekend Plans Post: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in
Way back in 2007, I got a new job at a new place that did stuff like have work parties. I had never worked at a place where I was one of the workers invited to the work parties. As a temp or person in “managed services”, one of the benefits given to employees was to give them the ability to tell temps/managed services people “you can’t come to the Christmas party”.
Sometimes we got to pick over the leftover Christmas cookies the following week.
But in 2007, I *FINALLY* became an employee! Of a real company! For the first time! And I got asked “hey, Jaybird. We need you to be Santa at the Children’s Christmas Party”. It was straightforward as heck. I’d show up early, the manager asked me to not smoke a cigarette that morning until after the party, I’d get dressed up, go into the room, sit on my throne, and The Elves would bring me presents and whisper a name in my ear. I’d bellow “JOHNNY” or “SUZIE” and the trembling child would walk forward, sit in my lap, start screaming, parents would take a picture, the kid would take the present, and leave. Next! Easy peasy.
This was always the most stressful part of the year for me. It was terrifying for the kids, it involved trying to not terrify the kids while wearing a fake beard over my real one, and it easily ate up a Saturday because the Morning was gone, and then I had to recover the rest of the day and then it was Sunday. But, you know, it was my first real job as a real employee at a real company and if a Santa they needed, a Santa they’d get. Back in 2012, I wrote down the post for what turned out to be the last Santa event for me at that company before getting a new job a few months later.
And the new job had a Christmas Party, but it was intimate. A dozen people taken out to dinner. More importantly: NO SANTA. The CEO wore a Santa hat whilst he mingled among the workers and that was it. It was nice.
And so the future Christmas parties went. We went from a dozen employees to a couple dozen and taking over a corner of the restaurant to taking over the entire dining room to having to change restaurants entirely. And there was still no Santa. The CEO wore a Santa hat whilst he mingled among the workers and that was it.
But then we had a global pandemic. And, this year, we did not have a Christmas Party. So the CEO said “hey, we can do a Christmas Zoom call!” and he gave me a call and asked me if I would be Santa for the Christmas call. Due to the pandemic and all. I was given a list of Children’s names and a list of the names of the Elves on the Shelves. My schtick was to name the kids, say I’ve been getting reports from the little elves, and ask what they wanted for Christmas and nod sagely. Okay, fine.
My boss gave me a call and told me that, in their house, the elf on the shelf stops working when one of the kid touches the elf… and the elf got touched on Tuesday. Please bring this up.
So, anyway, the Christmas zoom started, I named all of the children, I named the elves, I asked about what they wanted for Christmas. When I got to my boss’s family, I mentioned that I had not been getting reports from “Olaf” for a couple of days and I didn’t know what was going on with that. The little girl stood bolt upright, turned on her heel, and left the call. After a couple of minutes, she came back and spent the next minute explaining to me exactly what happened and how the elf came to be touched. I explained that I could reboot the elf and get him working again.
We then all sang Jingle Bells, I wished everyone Peace on Earth, an end to the COVID, and a Merry Christmas.
And, jeez, I had forgotten how stressful Santa Clausing can be. As such, this weekend will be spent recovering from being Santa.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is one of Santa’s Helpers. Photo taken by the author.)
So…
How does it feel to be a cop 😉Report
It was a moment of magic. My boss called me after and said that “SHE THOUGHT YOU WERE REAL. IT FREAKED HER OUT.”Report
“He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake” will always land a bit differently for her from this day forward…Report
Another co-worker wrote me today. He said that the little one knew I was the real thing because I knew all of their names *AND* I knew the name of the Elf on the Shelf.
Only Santa would have that info at his fingertips.Report
“Rebooting the elf,” so they are surveillance devices and not actual little beings?
I would have found that far creepier when I was a kid than the idea of some kind of rodent-sized humanoid just hanging out in the house.
(I dunno. My childhood experience with Santa was….different, I guess. The Santa my parents presented WANTED us to be good, but also recognized we weren’t perfect. Not that we shouldn’t TRY but the fact that we failed didn’t necessarily result in coal or even fewer presents.)
I don’t have any plans for the weekend. This was a pretty awful week, between finding out a friend has cancer, my brother and sister in law having a near-miss COVID exposure (for about a day we thought they had been exposed to someone who is now sick, but the timing was such that they weren’t close to that person after THEY got exposed) and issues at work where it was implied I had Not Been Sufficiently Caring towards a student who was claiming they deserved a higher grade than they actually earned. In normal times I’d go antiquing or something but “normal” is unrecognizable now so I guess I’ll clean house instead?Report
Are we not all surveillance devices in addition to being actual little beings?Report
I am sadly not that little of a being. And while I may see things, it takes a lot for me to be arsed to report it to authorities these daysReport
Anarchist Elf on the Shelf. “Hey, yeah. Santa and I had a falling out. I’m not going to report to him or nothin’. I just need a place to crash for a month.”
(Hey! I thought. That’d be pretty cool! So I googled it and while there are a handful of Elf of the Shelf pictures of the elf wearing a Sons of Anarchy vest, there are no pictures of an anarchist elf in my cursory look.)Report
It’s funny you mention this but we had to talk my son down about the elves which of course he learned about from his preschool teacher. I am pretty sure it was discussed in a normal non-threatening way but his takeaway was ‘there are little things in the house watching me…. at night.’ It took us forever to figure out what the hell he meant before we realized it was Santa’s elves/elf on a shelf.
Anyway my wife hates the ‘elf on the shelf’ thing for the reasons discussed on this thread and by dhex below. I just think it’s sort of dumb and the last thing I need is another chore. We probably wouldn’t do it for those reasons even if it didn’t apparently freak my kid out but the fact that it does means I can rest assured I’ll never need to get one.Report
I’m slightly annoyed because Elf on the Shelf is based on a vintage “pixie elf.” My grandma had one, I remember it fondly. She just hung it up on the wall at Christmas, no secrecy, no surveillance, just another fun Christmas thing.
After she died, some of the stuff she had owned was stolen out of her house before family could divvy it up, including the Christmas decorations. Some years later I found a similar but not identical elf in an antique shop and bought it for old times, and then “Elf on the Shelf” hit, and….well, it feels kind of like the Michael Bolton bit from “Office Space.” I haven’t put my elf out for a few years because of it (despite not having children who might be freaked out)Report
Oh my gosh! I remember finding a Pixie Elf at Gran’s house when I was a teenager (a knee hugger variant) and I assumed, retroactively, that it was an Elf on the Shelf.
I didn’t know that Elf on the Shelf only goes back to 2004.Report
Huh. I assumed the EotS was much newer. My boys would have been the right age for that thing from the beginning. I guess I can thank my natural Grinchiness for protecting us from that thing.Report
We were at the tail end of dial-up. It took longer for memes to propagate.Report
elf on the shelf is an xmas superstate primer conspiracy that’s being played out in the open and not enough people are upset about it.
think about it: what better way to prepare kids for living in the panopticon? and there’s no impetus to stop it on either end, because whether you’re a donk or a publican you need a superstate to do what you think government should.
(this is no crazier than any other critical theories about children’s toys, and it’s a lot more entertaining)
the past few years have become an extended hide and seek game with the elf on the shelf – the kid puts it somewhere hilarious (in the freezer, inside my coffee grinder, etc) and we put it other places (on the lego table surrounded by broken buildings, hanging upside down from a bannister, etc). but this is his last year.
the kid doesn’t know it yet so we’re planning on one of three scenarios for xmas day:
1) we damien hirst the elf and glue mount him to plywood.
2) using popsicle sticks and tin foil, create a tiny guillotine surrounded by tiny popsicle stick people, and behead the elf
3) a series of spoofed text messages to the wife from a kidnapper, including pictures of the elf with duct tape over his mouth, maybe crying…and then we refuse to pay so it ends with some pictures of the woods…the dark, dark woods.
1 is fine but too obvious a gen xer reference it’s my least fav
2 does a good job of teaching about the dangers of left and right wing populism but it’s a lot of glue and i try to avoid stores these days
3 is the most emotionally satisfying and probably the funniest i just gotta figure out how to spoof sms messages to signal
i had thought about giving him covid and making a lego icu…but that’s a little dark for the holidays.Report
The Panopticon is Real. You can either be aware of it or you can remain unaware of it. The Elf does a good job of explaining the Panopticon to little children. As they grow older, they can go through the same evolution that all of us do on Santa.
Santa is Real.
Santa does not exist.
Santa is a social construct that allows people to give gifts semi-anonymously.
Santa is real in the same way that any egregore is real.
You are Santa.
My favorite story involving Elves on Shelves involved the Elf getting involved with rule enforcement. The little guy failed to put his crayons away after a session of coloring. So Buddy (that was the elf’s name) took the crayons and drew on the counter, writing his name and so on. The child was so upset that he wrote a letter to Santa explaining that *HE* did not draw on the counter, it was *BUDDY* who drew on the counter and asked his parents to mail the letter. They mailed it and the crayons got put away henceforth.
The Panopticon is Real.Report
And even that can be a teaching moment. “Kid, we all agree it was Buddy and not you. But sometimes you have to deal with things that are zero percent your fault but one hundred percent your responsibility. And besides, now we know Buddy’s gonna draw on the counter, so we better make sure he hasn’t got anything to draw with…”Report
Yes, indeed. (I really should reach out to him and ask if the crayons still get put away.)Report
much of my pique comes from that we’d specifically said “no elf on the shelf to hell with your statist constructs maaaaan” and my in laws were all “oh hey we’re awful”
that said i’m leaning towards lego mad max for the elf’s end this xmas eve…the kid’s lego building projects are already fairly ad hoc and max max-ian (e.g. batman has a hulk body, technics arms, and eats pets)Report
One year I did a nativity scene with my toy robots. (It was the year we learned I was the only one who’d ever be playing with my toy robots.)Report
Santa is a Platonic Ideal.
at least in the way it was presented to me as a kid: that Santa is this being that loves you, and wants you to do what’s right, but even if you don’t, hey, he loves you, so you still get toys.
I am quite sure my parents’ faith (a sort of Progressive-Christianity Protestantism) informed how they presented Santa.Report
Yeah, when I first heard about it, it occurred to me that it’s the most American thing I could imagine.Report
No politics.Report
it is really american, tho. i think that’s a cultural observation rather than political.
the elf surveils and tattles.
the elf “sees all”.
the elf has a direct connection to the dispenser of stuff.
if the elf is displeased it threatens the stuff.
now we never played this game–because it is an awful lesson for kids–and instead played “where can we hide this horrible thing?” that became the game, rather than pretending the elf was some kind of semi-real, semi-mystical holiday cop/demigod.
(his name is “mr waffles” because i repeatedly put him in the frozen waffles box)Report
Has Mr. Waffles ever done a stint in the waffle iron? That’s what I’d have been tempted to do as a tweenReport
i was tempted to do it as a tween + ugh too many years. 🙂Report