Elf enthusiast lets loose in hardware store
There are elves hiding behind the paint cans, dangling from the light fixtures. Elves inside laundry hampers in the housewares department.
The rascally imps have taken over the Rona hardware store at Parc Ave. and Bernard St. It’s the work of Nathalie Vellin, the store’s home décor manager, herself a pixie at heart.
Vellin has spent the past month and a half transforming the store’s floor- to- ceiling front window into an imaginary forest where pointy-nosed elves amble up birch trees made from newspaper- wrapped cardboard tubes. They swing from ladders and hang upside down from the ceiling.
Then she got carried away and began hiding elves all over the store, “as if they had escaped from the forest and into the store.”
The other day a little girl came to the cash, eyes wide open, and asked if the elves were alive.
“But of course,” Vellin told her. “During the day they stop everything and pretend that they aren’t real. But at night, when everyone has gone home they come back to life.”
Vellin has ordered more than 1,000 toy elves from suppliers all over the world in many different sizes, price ranges and personality types. Grown- up collectors are drawn by the porcelain- faced elves in finely- tailored outfits complete with velour knickers and furtrimmed jackets that sell for up to $ 100. Kids seems to prefer the glitzier, smaller elves wearing redsequined jackets and pointy boots that go for $ 20 or so. Her own current favourite is the pastry- chef elf sporting a checked shirt and corduroy pants.
Vellin, who is from Lyons, France, says elves were not a part of her childhood. But Quebecers seem to feel a real kinship with them. Last year they sold every single elf and her suppliers told her that by Christmas Eve there was not an elf to be found on a shelf anywhere in Quebec.
It was a grandfather from the tiny village of Métabetchouan-Lac- ala- Croix, in Saguenay-Lac- Saint-Jean who seems to have sparked this provincewide elf-mania. Regis Tremblay told his grandchildren stories of the elves he had spotted around the house before Christmas. He built traps to try to catch them and soon enough the whole town was involved, putting up elf-crossings and sprinkling magic dust to lure the little lutins.
“Elves fit in well with the Québécois storytelling tradition. There is something about their mischievous reputation that resonates here,” Vellin says.
Now she’s fallen in love with them herself.
“I seem to have gone absolutely crazy this year,” she admits with a mischievous smile.
She confesses to slipping down from the second- floor home décor department every so often to see which elves have been sold and which ones are still there. She bends their legs to make them seem as if they are dancing a jig or getting ready to sprint. She tucks them headfirst into the Christmas trees, where they play hide and seek.
Vellin says she’s happy to bring a little Christmas cheer to a busy season.
“Elves make us smile. They remind us to have fun. To be children again from time to time.”