It will doesn’t matter what you would tell to your children, up to 6-7 years Santa will be SO REAL for them even if you told them otherwise. Your mileage may vary… (I blame this one on peer-to-peer cultural exchanges and the egregorious Santa related media paired with their blossoming criteria.)
1 Like
Thank you for coming up with that! Now I can think about other things.
Aha… I knew the design of the doll itself predated the book by decades because my mom had them, in red and green.
1 Like
Oh we had a few of those when I was a kid, courtesy of some relative or another. I thought they were creepy back then, even without the surveillance aspect.
4 Likes
we’ve done something similar on and off for years, but with a Moai statue we got from archie mcphee ages ago. we take turns hiding it around the house. you open a cabinet, and there it is. we got the idea from the Brady Bunch in Hawaii episodes, with the tiki idol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEoUnpZShT0
3 Likes
Isn’t aggressively pretending to be a tradition a not-terribly-implausible strategy for actually becoming one?
Once you’ve made it, of course, it would be tacky to talk about it that much; but until you’ve actually been time-honored, you can still pretend.
2 Likes
It worked for diamond engagement rings.
5 Likes
So, the elf is basically Santa’s clergy. I suspect that the very low-impact you specify is why even nominally omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent deities tend to accumulate human agents in practice; including ones with dedicated confessional, surveillance, and coercive functions.
1 Like
I’d argue that we’re already accepting of the surveillance state for people to even purchase these things and act out the “tradition”. I rejected this thing immediately.
2 Likes
Good Lord this is the dumbest article I have read in days
The article is interesting. How many toys and appliances are marketed containing one or more internet-enabled, copy-protected computing devices and code? There’s a significant risk of liability to many purchasers just from attempting to open and confirm what it does or doesn’t do on behalf of third parties.
2 Likes
4 Likes
All of them?
(Soon to be the most accurate answer, it seems.)
2 Likes
(whispering) Careful. He’ll hear us.
1 Like
My Dad is of German lineage, so I grew up with some of the Christmas traditions, and I LOVE the Krampus. If you’re bad he beats you with a stick and tosses you in his bag? So much more brutal than “oh, coal? WTF?”. Now mind you, we were never threatened with the Krampus, but I love there being a dark side to old St. Nick (besides the creepy watching you 24/7).
At Universal Studios Halloween this year they had a street decorated in horror-christmas style with guys in really good krampus makeup with stilts walking around. Awesome!
7 Likes
Oh, that is most excellent! My favorite thing I’ve learned all week.
I’ll reconstitute my family’s moribund collection of creches just so I can add caganers to every nativity scene!
3 Likes
It’s really not the Holidays until the good ol’ Crone on the Throne is on display.
edit: do not do an image search for “granny on toilet” unless you have “safe search” set
6 Likes
This is the reason I finally accepted these December traditions, the Santa myth almost seems like it is created to mirror religion and provide a good training for challenging it.
I’m from the Netherlands where we have a related tradition in December, Sinterklaas, which (besides the racist elements) is quite similar. Somewhere in November the Sint (Sinterklaas) comes to the Netherlands in his steamboat, 6 December it’s his birthday which we celebrate by accepting gifts from him on the day before. However a few of his helpers (looking really similar to blackface performers) are in the country the year round, they follow your every move and report to the head honcho, exactly like this elf deal way.
Thinking about this tradition in light of the surveillance normalization discussed here I’m suddenly less inclined to follow this tradition (not that I have kids of my own to indoctrinate yet). But maybe we need to reframe this in a way that makes it clear continues surveillance is neither desired or effective?
4 Likes
In that case why bother buying an Elf on the Shelf from the weird ‘reports to santa’-story-telling company instead of just buying a generic christmas elf?
