Congratulations, You Played Yourself on the Shelf
On the manufactured magic of Christmas
On a hot July day this summer, while my younger son—then 5—was climbing on rocks in Brooklyn Bridge Park, he turned to me casually.
“Mom, I have something to tell you.”
“Yeah?” I asked mildly, barely listening, prepared as always for any one of the litany of facts Max is fond of reporting, anything from kindergarten science trivia (“did you know WEEVILS live in ACORNS??”) to a play-by-play of some brain-melting YouTube video he’d watched earlier.
“Santa isn’t real,” he said, smiling impishly. “I know it’s you and dad.”
I could have wept. Not from sadness, but from joy. Finally—sweet Jesus, fucking finally!—I was free.
Listen, I have nothing against Santa. I drank the spiked Christmas Kool-Aid like every other other kid, playing along even as a teen when my parents would gift me presents “from Santa” (hopefully carpenter pants from dELiA*s, see below). But I never dreamed the insidious ways the lie would consume me when I became an adult. To a child, Santa is a magical man committing millions of misdemeanors in the spirit of the season; to a parent, Santa is a mental illness.
The first few years of my first son’s life my symptoms were mild: gifts came “from Santa,” sure, but he couldn’t read, or understand the holiday on any level. (Despite being an atheist-leaning agnostic, I purchased a Fisher Price Nativity set, which Sam would occasionally gnaw on, until one day, at two years old, he requested that I breastfeed the tiny, plastic baby Jesus.) Intuiting that my extremely shy child would not enjoy sitting on a stranger’s lap, we successfully avoided mall Santas but would occasionally run into them in the wild, and he would ask, from his terrified perch behind my legs, why Santa was getting money out of an ATM on Atlantic Avenue and not, say, at the North Pole cobbling together Hot Wheels.
What I should have said, in retrospect, is that Santa was more of an idea than a person, or that Santa had a really dedicated band of stalkers. What I did say was: “Santa can’t be everywhere at once, so he sometimes sends helpers out in his costume so that people still believe in him—kind of like Elvis.”
As the years passed, my dedication to the ruse intensified. I purchased special wrapping paper used only for “Santa’s” gifts, even writing out the tags in a painstakingly swirly, childlike script, as if Santa was a third-grader practicing her signature. On Christmas Eve, I helped Sam “track” Santa’s progress around the world using NORAD’s three-dimensional map. I hid gifts for one, and then two children in an 800-square foot apartment with only one decent closet. I ate the cookies and the carrots, leaving a thank-you note in “Santa’s” girlish scrawl. On one memorable Christmas Eve, Jeff and I drunkenly constructed a loft bed in the middle of the night so that it would “appear” fully built, while Sam slept in our bed. Every Christmas morning I woke up spent, and then watched my children delight over presents they believed came from an immortal elderly man who somehow broke into our second-floor apartment without a fireplace. I started to get resentful.
I want to pause here to say I would probably do it all again if I had to—I might not believe in Santa anymore but I believe in believing in him, if that makes sense. As the famous “Yes, Virginia” letter in the New York Sun said so beautifully, “Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! … There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.” Far be it from me, a woman who at age 19 regrettably tattooed a silhouette of Tinkerbell on her shoulder as a reminder to never lose her sense of childlike wonder, to take away the magic of belief from her kids. But even if we choose optimism (and, ahem, lying) over cynicism, we must agree that the Santa myth falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny.
For example, if Santa and his workshop of indentured elf servants make every Christmas toy, then why can you buy the exact same shit on Amazon any time of year you want? Does Santa make all the toys in the world, and then distribute through Jeff Bezos and the CEOs of Lego and Hasbro and fucking Mattel? Is Santa like an unseen mafia don of the toy business? Or, even more unbelievably, does Santa take it upon himself to make seasonal copies of these mass-market toys, despite the fact that the toy companies have huge factories and billion-dollar stocks, and Santa, according to lore, seems only to have at his disposal a team of miniature artisans who work with wooden mallets, and a stable full of flying deer?? Kids don’t worry about this stuff but even thinking about it makes me depressed.
That’s why kicking the Santa story to the curb feels so liberating. I can still tell my kids that they need to clean up the living room so Santa won’t slip on a pile of Pokemon cards and kill himself, but it’s with a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge playfulness that was missing before. Just earlier today, baking cookies with my now-6 year-old, he looked up from stirring chocolate chips into the batter and asked, “Wait, mom—if you’re Santa, do you eat the cookies?” When I told him I did, he threw down the spoon and told me that he wasn’t about to waste his time baking cookies for his own mom when he could be watching grown men on YouTube compete to see who could tolerate the most number of spiders on their face for $10,000. Which, honestly, is fair.
The one make-believe holiday tradition I simply cannot abide is the Elf on the Shelf. I won’t hate on you if you do it, but damn that’s a lot of extra credit work when parents are already expected to hype Santa all December. I’m sure you’ve seen the pics on Instagram and Facebook of people who presumably were once medically sane stretching Saran wrap across their toilet bowl and dusting it with flour so that the Elf can “go ice fishing.” Look, I’m all for whimsy, but children aren’t the ones who need it. IT’S US. It’s the grown-ups, we need the magic and the whimsy and a reason to believe in something pure in a dying world. That’s why I think Elf on the Shelf should be rebranded for adults, using the kinds of elves who actually know how to fucking work, like the ones who make fudge stripe cookies and cobble shoes. Imagine waking up every morning all month to discover that someone had cleaned a different room in your house! Or made your coffee, or canceled the dinner plans you wish you hadn’t made, or finished your work for the week so that you would have more time for last-minute shopping, or stress weeping while listening to “River” by Joni Mitchell play while waiting in line at Walgreen’s.
Now that would be something.