Well, merry peoples of the world, it looks like Christmas has once again come to a close. You’ve all eaten up your candy canes and gingerbread houses, and you’ve begun to clean up the first layer of torn wrapping paper littered around your living room floor. Now, I can only suspect, you’re stripping your house of all the tinsel and greenery and are buffing up your to-do lists with New Year resolutions that you swear you’re going to follow through with this year. (Hey, maybe you can finally start working out like you said you would! Ha, ha.) All in all, this year’s going to be aces, and the Christmas of 2014 is nothing but a beautiful part of history to you now.
Maybe now that you’ve got the free time, you can take a moment to check your human privilege and acknowledge that Christmas isn’t really over. Not to us poor elves who are still slaving away up here at the North Pole.
Let me take a moment to explain. I hope that in the recesses of your mind, you’ve toyed around with the idea that we elves work 24/7, 365 days a year to make sure we build the good boys and girls of the world the presents that they really want. While I appreciate the sentiment, I can’t help but wonder if you really think we manufacture all of the world’s toys. Sure, there might be some places in evangelized African countries, or Vietnam, or someplace, where kids still ask for simple toys like dolls and wooden cars… and we do still build those, as well as all the off-brand headphones and mp3 players confused parents ask us for… but the majority of the children that we serve today ask for things like video games, name-brand gizmos, and music CDs.
Now, of course, we can’t build those kinds of toys – that’s Nintendo’s job, Microsoft’s job, you know the rest. They know how to build those kinds of gadgets, and we don’t; they’ve never given us the blueprints, and I don’t think that they ever will. So, each year, in order for us to distribute those kinds of goods, we have to sort out a metric fuckload of legal paperwork ensuring fair trade and distribution of all these companies’ products. You cannot comprehend the gargantuan amounts of red tape we have to endure in order to get your bullshit PokeMon game to you. Diplomatic amnesty from all countries across the planet; permissions and licenses to distribute products with minimal profit to the companies; repairs and renovations to North Pole property; shipping information to the most enigmatic and magical place on the planet… it’s a logistical nightmare. In fact, that’s the majority of the work that’s done these days. The workshops have long been replaced with cubicles and fluorescent lighting. Some of the elves are beginning to wear power suits, which as you can imagine just doesn’t work for us – the shoulderpads are as wide as we are tall. We look like little airplanes with briefcases, it’s ridiculous.
You also seem to romanticize the idea of Santa Claus as this plump, jolly old man with a velvety red jacket and a big sack of toys. Hah! Santa Claus is, in actuality, quite a monster to us lowly elves, always bossing us around and telling us to do this and that in addition to our regular paperwork. I don’t say this to speak little of the man; to be honest, he can’t even help it. He’s been a diabetic for well over a thousand years, thanks to all the cookies and milk you guys give him, thinking you’re doing him a favor. Since the world population has been booming in the past hundred years, however, he’s been getting more cookies than he can handle. In recent years we’ve been reallocating our elven magicks from powering our living quarters to keeping his insulin supply running, and the poor guy uses up something like 50 liters of magic-infused insulin a day. And can you imagine how elastic his stomach is? He takes the same amount of time as any other human to evacuate his body, but he consumes several hundred tons of cookies in a matter of hours! He balloons up like a dead whale. We even have a 480-elf-strong taskforce dedicated to dealing with Santa’s bathroom business the day after. The ride doesn’t end there, though: after that whole mess, his belly skin acts like a giant skirt draped over his feet. The big round belly you see every year isn’t fat – it’s a ball of stretched-out skin taped up into a giant ball, like a bowl full of jelly, but not really at all. Sometimes he walks around with his belly wrapped around his body like a towel, and walks around without pants since his jingle bells are hidden beneath his blanket of skin. He says it’s “more comfortable this way.” It certainly isn’t more comfortable to us.
Even with all that, I could survive living as one of Santa’s elves, forever indentured in my little office cell filling out documents to mail to Hershey’s Chocolates (that’s the company I’m assigned to work with)… if only it weren’t for the damned reindeer. All of them think they’re such hot shit, flying Santa around on his sleigh and managing to get to all of the children’s houses in a single night. That’s all just magic doing the work for them, though, the reins are enchanted to carry around things millions of times their own weight. The reindeer don’t do anything except run off the rooftops, after that they just dangle from their reins like ragdolls and talk about hot does until they get home. The rest of the year they don’t do anything but lift weights and drink spiked eggnog – they’re like the frat boys of the North Pole. Yet Santa reveres them as the “only ones who pull their weight around here,” like he thinks he’s funny, poking fun at his own weight, and then we laugh and he turns it on us and says we’re “fat-shaming” him, the asshole. He has some of the reindeer act as our managers, making sure we do our work appropriately. They’re animals, though, so they don’t know a single thing about office synergy. The rest who don’t act as managers actually do contractual work around the world, raising money to offset the costs of North Pole renovations. They’re encouraged to take productive jobs, like PR work or charity work, but usually they end up taking jobs that enable their douchbaggery in the real world. Here’s a picture of Prancer from last year:
Look at him. He got offers as a free agent for the Celtics, the Bulls, the Heat… he got a personal request from LeBron James to join the Cavs. But he joined the Orlando Magic. Want to know why? Because of “the magic I do every Christmas Eve, flying around the world and helping little children everywhere.” What a dick.
I got off on a bit of a rant there, but surely you get the picture at this point. You may think that Christmas is over, but for us elves, the work never ends. We toil away with paperwork that could kill any of the Toby Flendersons the world has to offer; we suffer through bosses who make me wish I worked for Krampus the Christmas Devil; and the worst part is that we have no rest, no vacation, nothing to look forward to throughout the year. There’s a reason Santa chose elves to work for him over a thousand years ago: because we live forever, don’t sleep, and honor our work no matter how trivial or demeaning. I just wish that, after a millennium or so, some people would recognize us a little more for what we have to go through on a daily basis. You have some serious privilege, you humans, and it’s about time you check it instead of taking us for granted.
Sincerely,
Gringus the Elf
P.S. Reggie the Reindeer isn’t too bad a guy, but they don’t take him flying with the other nine reindeer for some reason…
-Jacob Conrad, Staff-Member