Nath shows up in the weirdest places.
Like the time “he got all tied up and was hanging upside down from Spiderman’s spiderweb,” Logan Betts said.
When the 5-year-old goes to sleep, he doesn’t know where he’ll find the elf in the morning.
See, every night, Nath and millions of elves like him fly to the North Pole to report to Santa Claus on the kids they live with. It’s all explained in the book, “The Elf on the Shelf,” that Nath came with when Logan and his sister Parker “adopted” him last year.
Logan came up with his elf’s name.
“It’s short for Nathan, I guess,” his mother, Cassie Mello, said.
For millions of American families, Elf on the Shelf — which turns 10 this year — is a young tradition that adds to the Christmas magic. For others, it’s teaching questionable lessons, such as that constant surveillance is OK, and one should behave now based on the reward you expect later.
Complicated, right? Especially considering we’re talking about a roughly 12-inch-long cloth doll.
Well, no, it isn’t for Mello. Every night she moves Nath around the family’s Everett apartment: One day he’s on the ceiling fan, the next on the Christmas tree, the day after that stuck to the wall or riding a wooden toy train on a living room shelf.
“The best part of it is seeing the joy on their faces,” she said.
That is what Elf on the Shelf creators wanted to share when they pitched the book and doll to publishing companies, said Christa Pitts, one of the creators who live in Georgia. Pitts and her twin sister, Chanda Bell, grew up with a Christmastime elf, which they named Fisbee.
Publishers originally rejected the elf and book, which Bell wrote with their mother, Carol Aebersold.
One publisher “told us that it was destined for the damaged goods bin, and they could see no future for it in the market,” Pitts said.
She framed that letter and hung it in her office.
So, the women paid for the first run of books and elves in 2005. Their company, Creatively Classic Activities and Books, is based just outside Atlanta.
“The Elf on the Shelf,” which sells for $29.95, spread slowly, first in the Southeast and then East Coast before heading west. In recent years, it has gone abroad, mostly to Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Ireland, she said.
The book was always subtitled as “A Christmas Tradition,” perhaps a bold move for a product first financed with credit cards and money Pitts got from selling her house.
“We knew that if families got this into their homes and experienced it, then that piece would take care of itself,” she said.
“It’s fun. It’s magical,” she said. “It’s really the personality of the family that’s reflected in the elf.”
In Arlington, Jennifer Palfrey’s 6-year-old daughter found a loophole in that magic just before Christmas last year.
“Kennedi told us that her elf opened one of her presents early,” she said.
Palfrey was stuck — either accept her daughter’s explanation or admit their elf, Bella, doesn’t actually come to life and fly around their house.
“There’s not much you can say as a parent at that moment,” she said.
Unfortunately for Kennedi, the present was a T-shirt and not some exciting new toy, she said.
While Bella made for a convenient scapegoat, Kennedi takes her seriously. Touching the elf takes away its magic, according to the book. If that happens at Palfrey’s home, they use cooking tongs to pick up the elf and put it in the freezer to “recharge its magic,” she said.
Some folks have criticized the elf’s rules, saying it’s not really imaginative play if kids are told the elves are real but that they can’t play with them.
And then there is the surveillance role. Does Elf on the Shelf teach “a generation of children to accept, not question, increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of surveillance?” asked a paper published last year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Sure, adults see a cloth and plastic toy, but parents tell their kids that it’s real.
Culture and parents are the “two of the most important things shaping who we become,” said Jack Marshall, an attorney and founder of ProEthics, an ethics consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia.
More today than ever before, parents have to teach kids to value their privacy, he said.
Foreign hackers, marketers, even our own National Security Agency have been prying into our lives. Now even Santa outsources his intelligence gathering operation?
Elf on the Shelf “might not be a big deal now, but it plants the germ of an idea,” he said.
Seriously? It’s Christmas. They’re kids.
Exactly, said David Kyle Johnson, a philosophy professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and author of “The Myths That Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not that they’re just kids,” he said. “It’s that they are only kids. They are learning lessons every day that will stick with them for life.”
It is not hard for an adult to recall some childhood moment that seemed trivial at the time but shaped who they are today.
The problem is that parents have no way of knowing which trivial moments are leaving deep impressions with their kids, he said. “Ultimately the stakes are high.”
That might be complicating it a bit, Pitts said. Sure, “Santa gets reports on everything you do — good and bad. We like to focus on the good things you do,” she said. The NSA has not requested access to the elves’ reports, she said.
In Everett, Ryan Reese and his family tried Elf on the Shelf a few years back.
“It didn’t fit with our family and how we celebrate Christmas,” he said.
For them, the holiday is about “God giving the gift of Jesus to us,” said Reese, who is pastor at Everett’s Pinehurst Baptist Church.
He has no problem with other people making the elf part of their family tradition. Some Pinehurst Baptist parishioners bring it out every year, he said.
“We’re not anti-tradition. Last weekend we watched ‘Ernest Saves Christmas,’” he said.
And they have a tree with presents below.
The presents are not based on Santa’s naughty or nice list, though.
“We tell our kids the presents come from us because we love you,” he said. “Sometimes my kids are good, sometimes they’re bad” — like all kids.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com.
Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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