I’ve found my Christmas nemesis. It’s hate, actually

With apologies to whoever wrote A Visit from St Nicholas, I’d just like to note the following: ’Twas two weeks before Christmas/When I found myself/Wishing imminent death/On the elf on the shelf.

At the risk of coming across like the boss of a Grinch lynch mob, let me also say this. I have been wrong about any number of festive season-related matters recently. When I announced that I would rather pay $9 in parking fees and give myself shocking blisters schlepping across the city dragging 800 cubic tonnes of Lego – all to avoid a $12 delivery fee — that was a mistake. When I assumed (based on nothing) that I had magically become a person who could gift-wrap spherical presents without tears and threats of violence, that was also a miscalculation.

But the elf, oh the elf. I knew from the minute I clocked the freakishly brown, plastic eyes of that little Mata Hari in a onesie that I had met my Christmas nemesis. The folksy backstory, the enforced entry to a “like-minded, passionate elf community”, the endless, horrifying blood sport that is finding new ways to pose the little blighter each night … no, no, and for the love of tinsel-flecked reindeer droppings, no.

Just to be clear, my raging, emphatic, unstinting hatred of the elf doesn’t preclude me from wishing I’d dreamt it up first. The concept (family adopts elf, which spends its days watching the kids before flying home to Santa to report on their behaviour and then returning to a new place in the house the next morning), is fiendishly simple. No one is allowed to touch the elf, or it loses its magical powers (which can only be restored with a sprinkle of cinnamon). To me at least, the whole thing seems more North Korea than North Pole, but what do I know?

Clearly not much. The last elf on the shelf census appears to have been taken in 2022, when its manufacturer estimated there were roughly 22.5 million of them in circulation worldwide. Over the past 19 years, “the Santaverse” (aka the Lumistella Company, all rights reserved) has also spawned a number of ancillary “products for crafting holiday joy”, designed to “make every morning magical” and “rekindle nostalgia and wholesome authenticity”.

So far, so trademarked. Get elf, shove on shelf, move nightly. Doesn’t sound too onerous, said the Ghost of Christmas Past.

If only that was still acceptable today. Given its provenance and popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that the elf’s antics would be hijacked by a certain group of outwardly focused, upwardly mobile parents. They’re the same ones, I assume, who regularly take to Instagram to humblebrag about the fact that six-year-old Cressida went to school and ate every mouthful of her lovingly homemade Korean bibimbap bowl with bulgogi beef, pickled matchstick carrots and blanched watercress, while the rest of us chisel devon sandwiches off the side of the lunchbox.

It’d also be fine if kids didn’t talk to one another. The problems arise when it turns out that Cressida’s elf spent the previous night making a short film about the fun it had braiding the reindeers’ tails and teaching Santa how to speak with an Australian accent. By the morning after that, it’d turned the dishwasher into a car wash, then rock-climbed up a wall made of decorative bows, then popped up in the pantry with four of its elfin mates, who’d converted the slow cooker to a (marshmallow-filled) hot tub and thrown a party.