Elf-perpetuating holiday tradition

We’d lived in the neighborhood maybe three months when we started hearing about the elves. It was just after Thanksgiving. The 9-year-old burst through the door, panicked.

“We need an elf!” she cried. “Everyone here except us has elves!”

We looked at her blankly.

“Little magic guys? Fairy wings? So they can fly around with little presents and scrolls?”

Evidently, it was some micro-custom that had overtaken our block in Orange County. People had toy elves, it was said, that came alive at night during December. Some elves left messages, some left small presents. The pros wrote on scrolls; the really savvy ones wrote on parchment scrolls with burnt edges. Some elves were a foot tall, some just a few inches.

Some were bearded like Santa. Some looked suspiciously like trolls.

It sounded like one of those “fun, new holiday traditions” in women’s magazines that make you want to run out and do penance. Lights, tree, stockings, vacation -- we had a system. Our drill didn’t include Santa’s advance men bearing burnt-parchment paperwork.

The urge for a long winter’s nap was suddenly overwhelming.

And yet, here we were on a block in which all the kids had elf pals. All but our kids. The new kids. The tragic, elfless new kids. No curly-shoed advocate for them. No fresh-picked candy cane in the morning. No burnt-parchment dispatch saying, “Santa almost nailed you for what you did to your sister’s Barbie, but I got your back, bud.”

We needed an elf.

The December holidays look so straightforward, don’t they? The Nativity scenes, the menorahs, that commercial with St. Nick on the electric shaver -- it all seems a done deal.

But like so many things, the holidays turn out to be a work in progress. Some people think Kwanzaa is an ancient African version of Christmas; in fact, it was invented in 1966 by a Cal State Long Beach professor. “Chrismukkah” -- half Hanukkah, half Christmas -- wasn’t even a word in the ‘80s, now it’s on “The O.C.” as the peg of the holiday episode.

These factoids come via the Internet, where we looked for the elf fad. Unfortunately we found only a variation that, two years ago, a Louisiana mother of two had tried to commercialize.

“The name of the company is ‘Where’s My Elf Hat,’ ” said Mabyn Shingleton of Baton Rouge, “but it’s based on our family tradition.”

In Shingleton’s version, an invisible sprite named “Elfie” starts visiting Dec. 1, leaving his hat behind with a note on it. A friend in Mississippi passed along the hat concept, but the pen pal part was Shingleton’s idea: “Elfie would get them to get their Christmas lists together. He’d talk to them about grades, what was going on in school.”

But our neighborhood thing was about elves, not hats. Worse, these elves were said to have come directly from Santa. We couldn’t just walk up to the mom next door and say, “Who can hook me up with an elf? Wal-Mart?” Because if kids were within earshot -- and when aren’t they -- they’d leap out, shrieking, “Only Santa has elves!”

So, subtly, we buttonholed one of the moms outside a birthday party. “Who can hook us up with an elf?” we hissed. “Wal-Mart?” Instantly, half a dozen small children surrounded us, eyes beady, ears alert.

“Did you say elf?” one demanded. The conversation abruptly ended.

A call the next day to another mom caught her, unfortunately, with a sick grade-schooler whose cold had not only kept her home from school, but had also given her superhuman hearing.

“Who’s that?” the little voice called from the background. “Tell her she has to write to Santa for an elf.”

Gradually, the back story came together. The sister of the mom down the hill was a second-grade teacher in Illinois. Four years ago, she came across the nightly-note-from-the-elf idea as a way to make her kids write.

Any elf would do; the notes were the ticket. Anyway, that mom tried the elf, and within days, her kids’ friends wanted one too. This year, it broke wide open, according to the clerk at our corner gift shop, where the cheapest elf was an 8-inch bearded guy who was nearly sold out at $31. Apparently, someone had unleashed a run by bringing a scroll to school for show-and-tell.

So the 9-year-old wrote Santa. Next day, voila! An 8-inch bearded elf stood in the living room.

The neighborhood kids came by to spot-check. They peered into his little face. They admonished us not to touch him, lest his spell be broken. They read the note he had left -- yes, rolled into a scroll, God help us -- and saw he’d given no name. Instantly, they composed a note demanding it.

And since then, they have written and written, as elf sightings have burgeoned. The other day a fairy-winged figure was spotted hauling a piece of chocolate candy onto somebody’s roof -- or so it’s alleged. All we know for sure is that not even Christmas is trend-proof.

Got elves?

Shawn Hubler can be reached at [email protected]