By Francis X. Maier
The Mahoney and Maier clans have been best friends for half a century. Our children—they eight, us four—grew up together and remain very close. Kim, the eldest of the Mahoney brothers, is godfather to our youngest son. Former Marine fighter pilot, today he is an admirable Catholic husband and father. But as a child, and one with precocious genes; well, that’s another story. At some point around the age of reason—about seven years old—he asked his mother if Santa Claus really existed. His mother, a firm advocate of the truth, told him no, but that Santa was a beautiful part of the Christmas spirit. To which Kim replied: “If there’s no Santa, I don’t believe in God either.”
It’s an impressive piece of childish logic, though flawed. And it raises some useful questions about Santa and all the North Pole propaganda machinery.
Consider Elf on a Shelf (hereinafter, ES). It’s a Christmas favorite. The typical ES marketing text says something like this: “Have you ever wondered how Santa makes his list of the good? Well, Santa has a trusted scout elf assigned to every family in the world. He will find a place in the house to sit and observe all day. Every night, he will fly back to report to Santa at the North Pole and tell him all your stories and adventures.”
Isn’t it adorable? Maybe, but think about it. A skeptic might point out that it also reports all your mistakes, failures, and bad behaviors. The whole ES operation might be subsidized by the coal industry. Worse yet, Santa’s little helper might be working for—or at least sharing your personal data with—Krampus, who is a very different kind of Christmas creature; it’s just a rumor, but where there’s smoke there’s usually fire. And doesn’t it seem a bit strange that ES shows up all over the house, uninvited, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, with his mischievous and friendly smile, his androgynous complexion, and his Aryan blue eyes?
One might reasonably wonder: does jolly old Saint Nicholas really need a branch of the elves’ guild that functions as the Stasi?
Let’s be honest: Elf on a Shelf is an ambiguous figure; an embodied enigma. Is he a friend and champion of children around the world? Or simply another minion of consumer capitalism; a servant of the voracious Christmas commerce and, perhaps, a paid informant for unknown interested parties? These are serious questions.
I’ll return to them in a moment. In the meantime, I have a confession. My wife and I are not only accomplices in the Père Noël/Father Christmas/Santa Claus scheme. We are veteran agents of the narrative; basically a team of Santa’s Workshop agitprop for decades.
While cleaning a basement closet earlier this month, we found twenty years of homemade annual Santa elf charts, 90×60 cm: the complete set of North Pole personnel files on our children, now adults. The purpose of those charts, all those years ago, was simple. Every night, from December 1 to Christmas Eve, Santa’s real elves (us) would visit the Maier house and leave a kind of “performance evaluation”—there’s no kinder way to put it—on each of our children.
The kids loved it. They believed in the elves, or at least pretended to, until almost entering middle school. Of course, the December chart sometimes generated sibling grievances and cross-accusations. That’s life in a healthy family. But it could also lead, especially in the last week before the Big Day, to modest efforts at behavioral reform.
The elves offered each child a bit of nightly life coaching in a few scribbled words—“Don’t bite your brother,” etc.—but what really mattered were their five daily behavior rating categories: gold star (wonderful job!), silver star (good job!), green star (okay, but you can do better), red star (you’re on the road less traveled, in the wrong direction), and the dreaded black mark (hope you like coal, kid). Fortunately, these particular elves were guilty of grade inflation. Black marks were few.
So, what’s the point of all this?
Walking with J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, C. S. Lewis dismissed myths as “lies breathed through silver.” Only after his conversion could Lewis see the deeper truths about the world captured in myths and fairy tales. Only then could he write The Chronicles of Narnia with such beauty and mastery.
Much has changed since then. Today we live in a world where Santa Claus (John Travolta) advertises Capital One credit cards. Modern consumer economics does not argue or attempt to refute supernatural and transcendent realities. Instead, it makes them irrelevant, unintelligible, and ultimately absent. It colonizes the heart and hijacks the imagination. It is anesthetic to the soul and dulling to the intellect. It is deeply materialistic and, therefore, in practice, quite atheistic. Fully assimilating into such a culture comes at an inhumanly high price—“inhumanly,” because the meaning of our humanity is precisely what is at stake—.
And this brings us back to Elf on a Shelf, to the homemade elf charts, and to that nagging matter of God highlighted at the beginning by young Kim. G. K. Chesterton once observed that “[children] are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” The young want to know the rules of the game: the nature of justice, good and evil. And before being conscripted into a crude commercial service, Saint Nicholas offered some of that clarity: gifts for the good, other options for the not-so-good. Think of his elves, visible and invisible, as agents of moral order.
“Visible and invisible”: we can end there. Reality, as Kim learned growing up, is more than our limited senses can measure. Behind all Christmas traditions there is something even greater. Some myths, as Tolkien wrote, have entered history. Some myths are true. But only one redeems a fallen world: “The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of human history”: the birthday of joy; the decisive and undeserved intervention of God’s love.
That’s what we celebrate next week. That’s what makes Christmas “Happy.”
About the author
Francis X. Maier is a senior research fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.