The cartoon version airing on CBS brings all this to computer-generated life, which is, of course, barely any life at all. The animation reminds you of the kind seen in allergy-relief commercials, and yet so much tender, loving care apparently went into “The Elf on the Shelf”: Hundreds of animators in India worked on it — the credits are packed with Deepaks. (And Vikrams, Abhijeets, Rakeshes, Sandeeps, Neelus; an endless parade of names reminding us that nothing outsources itself quite like Christmas can.)
At the North Pole, an eager pixie scout (voiced by Brendan Dooling) receives his first assignment, but Santa Claus warns him that it’s a doozy: At the suburban McTuttle house, it seems as though young Taylor McTuttle is on the threshold of “not believing.”
Not believing in what? The existence of Santa Claus, a viewer assumes, but also a belief inall of it, whatever it is. Like all secular expressions of the holiday, “The Elf on the Shelf” steers far clear of religious faith, insisting instead on a broadly defined system of “believing” in Christmas — vague yet ethically unobjectionable ideals.
The pixie scout is boxed up and delivered to the McTuttle house, where a blase Taylor — who appears, cartoonically, to be about 10 years old, precisely the proper age to “get it” about Santa Claus, etc. — shows hostility toward the Elf on the Shelf.
But Taylor’s twin sisters and parents are overjoyed by the elf’s inert presence, and the family (through song; through the worst sort of prefabricated song) perform the ritual of naming their elf: Chippey.
Thus magicalized, Chippey flies home that night to deliver his initial findings: Taylor is irredeemably skeptical about Christmas beliefs. Can he be saved?
Of course he can. “Christmas is a time for forgiveness,” the McTuttle family sings, in a loop of illogical (though empirical) reasoning: “That’s why we all believe in Christmas.”
The real failure here is that “The Elf on the Shelf’s” own cynicism — at its heart, it’s just a half-hour advertisement for a book and a toy — prevents it from joining the canon of prime-time animated Christmas specials that actually move the spirit. That’s okay. The bar set by Charlie Brown, Dr. Seuss and Rankin/Bass is quite high; few will ever achieve it, but plenty try each holiday season. Most fail for the same antiseptic reasons that “Elf on the Shelf” does.
* * *
But while we’re here, I find myself fascinated by “The Elf on the Shelf’s” success as a warmhearted disciplinary tool.
I first heard of the shelf-elf phenomenon five Christmases ago, when I was working on abook about modern Christmas traditions in a typical American suburb. Two days after Christmas, a municipal waste engineer drove me out to the county landfill (it was that sort of Christmas book), and on the way, he told me about “The Elf on the Shelf” and the amazing, even sweet way in which it had calmed down his hyperactive daughter’s frenetic anticipation for Christmas. The next holiday season, I saw “The Elf on the Shelf” (and imitators) everywhere, from church holiday bazaars to Barnes & Noble.
The concept of an omniscient and judgmental Santa (and his deputized elves) tracks with the evolution of American-style Christmas in the 19th century. As noted by historian Stephen Nissenbaum (in “The Battle for Christmas”) and others, Christmas in our nation’s early days was a lawless melee, in which the impoverished lower classes would riot if they were not appeased by booze and other treats given to them by their bosses and wealthier neighbors.
It was well-off New Yorkers of the early-to-mid-1800s who found refuge in repurposing the holiday as a family-minded, nominally religious retreat from social mayhem. The modernized morality of Dickens and other storytellers emphasized Christmas as a time to do good, to calm down, to behave. In such households, some theorize, the children assumed a role previously reserved for the town beggars: By staying out of trouble, they got a Christmas treat from a jolly old elf. Later came the songs and folklore about the 24-7 surveillance from the North Pole.
And so it’s worked for nearly two centuries, so long as you don’t think about it too much. “The Elf on the Shelf” is just another nannycam in a nanny state obsessed with penal codes. As long as you believe in him, the pixie-scout elf is no different than the store security camera and the gizmo that automatically generates speeding tickets. The tattle-tale elf, who reports back to the corporate Christmas machine, fits right in with our times.
The Elf on the Shelf:
An Elf’s Story
(30 minutes) airs Friday at 8:30 p.m.
on CBS.
Orignally Found On:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cbss-elf-on-the-shelf-unwarranted-christmas-surveillance-techniques/2011/11/23/gIQApCSTtN_story_1.html
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