Otus the Head Cat
The Elf on the Shelf reports from rehab.
The following letter arrived at the Democrat-Gazette this week via courier. It was in a plain brown envelope addressed to me with a note that said, “Otus — You’ll know what to do with this. I include my photo, because full confession is Step 1 of the 12-step recovery program.”
I print it here in its unexpurgated entirety (except for the redaction to protect the innocent) .
— Otus the Head Cat
“Naughty or nice. Oh, the horror. The horror.
“Hello. My name is Foddle and I am a former scout elf for Santa Claus who resided at the home of [redacted], a dentist in Little Rock. I was a scout until recently, when I submitted my resignation and went into rehab.
“I believe making my likeness into a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2012 was the beginning of my disillusionment. It was all simply too much. Oh, I weathered An Elf’s Story, the 23-minute infomercial disguised as a cartoon that aired on CBS in 2011, but it’s been downhill since that balloon.
“Although scout elves have been an integral part of the North Pole legend and lore as long as there has been a Santa Claus, it wasn’t until the iconography of the children’s picture book The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition by Carol V. Aebersold and her daughter, Chanda Bell, appeared in 2005 that the world became aware of our story.
“I must admit, including ‘A Christmas Tradition’ in the title was marketing genius. If you build it, they will come. It wasn’t long before millions of my fellow scout elves were pouring out of factories in China and incorporated into Santa’s annual ‘naughty or nice’ survey.
“Those of us who’ve been around for hundreds of years call these newbies ‘Andy Acolytes.’ They are annoying in their sycophantic minion lackeyness. Their sniveling, obsequious subservience to the ‘jolly’ old taskmaster and his termagant shrew of a wife served to increase the incidence of PTHS (post traumatic holiday syndrome) among those of us elves with half a conscience.
“Our initial assignment was fairly simple until the process was commodified: Sit on a shelf. Observe who is being naughty and nice. Report nightly to Santa. Return to a different shelf or location for the next day.
“Children were not allowed to touch us for fear of disturbing the ‘Christmas magic’ that allowed us to fly via teleportation to the North Pole each night. It was like a game. It was almost sweet. Then Aebersold and Bell ruined it all.
“Before long, there were so many scout elves reporting that Santa resorted to data mining, storing the naughty and nice information in the cloud and employing complicated algorithms to perform naughty and nice calculations, data processing and automated reasoning tasks.
“It became impersonal, and Santa turned querulous.
“Scout elves were reduced to automaton functionaries — just more cogs in the vast commercialization process that has turned Christmas into a self-perpetuating behavior/reward model that has ruined a generation of children who’ve come to expect unreasonable and unnecessary gratification for actions that should be instilled for altruistic purposes.
“Oh, the horrific things I have seen. The worst, however, was the sad and pathetic case in 2015 of Isabelle, the 7-year-old New Jersey girl who panicked after she accidentally touched her scout elf and, fearing she had caused it to lose its magic, called 911 for help.
“What manner of so-called harmless Christmas tradition causes such angst among innocent children? How are we elves, as the highest order in cryptozoology dating back to Norse and Germanic cultures and assimilated into Christian cosmologies, expected to sleep at night?
“Our once-innocent observations (‘He knows when you’ve been bad or good; So be good for goodness sake!’) have been corrupted to encourage behavioral paranoia, the abrogating of parental responsibilities, and the societal acceptance of what one critic termed ‘a Langley-like application of unwarranted surveillance techniques during Christmastime.’
“Who are we to judge naughty or nice? What lifelong psychological scars are we inflicting? I simply could not continue in my assignment as a scout elf. Today I find myself in the Snorri Sturluson Holistic Recovery Center for Contumacious Elves. Admitting I need help is Step 1.”
Until next time, Kalaka reminds you that Step 8 is making a list of all persons they have harmed. I suppose once the list is complete, Foddle will have to check it twice.
Disclaimer
Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat’s award-winning column of Z humorous fabrication X appears every Saturday. E-mail: mstorey@arkansasonline.com