The Elf on the Shelf made spying a holiday pastime

As the parent of a half-Jewish, half-Christian child who was already a sharp-eyed Santa skeptic by the time he started preschool, I did not want my kid to be the jerk who ruined Christmas for his classmates. This is why, circa 2011 or so, I explained to my son that, rather than saying “Santa isn’t real,” it might be better to say something like, “I don’t know if I believe in Santa. Do you?” and then listen to what the other person had to say. Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on the presence in his preschool classroom of the Elf on the Shelf, an agent whose existence both confirmed Santa’s realness and provided specific infrastructure to an intelligence-gathering operation headquartered at the North Pole. After a teacher delivered a quick Elf on the Shelf explainer, I blurted out, “So it’s a holiday narc?”

At the time I first encountered it, “The Elf on the Shelf” was a new addition to America’s consumer pageant — a 2005 picture book that boldly billed itself as “a Christmas tradition” and featured the titular elf introducing himself in rhyming couplets. “At holiday time, Santa sends me to you. I watch and report on all that you do. My job’s an assignment from Santa himself. I am his helper, a friendly scout elf.” Each book came with an elf doll whose cheery red suit, foldable limbs, and pointy cap were set off by the watchful expression of an overeager school hall monitor; it was meant to be moved from place to place each day in December, every change in locale a reminder to take the lyrics of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” — “He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake” — as a benevolent warning. The Elf on the Shelf was a proud snitch who conveyed the reason for the season in no uncertain terms: “The gleam in my eye and my bright little smile/shows you I’m listening and noting your file.”

Written and initially self-published by Carol Aebersold and daughters Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts, the Elf on the Shelf wasn’t an overnight success; the optics of a fleet of identically dressed little guys showing up to the homes of strangers and announcing their intention to report bad behavior to a central authority was, even in 2004, a hard sell. But the project had marketing magic on its side from the start: Pitts was a QVC host who eventually took over marketing and brand development, and within a decade, the Elf on the Shelf was winning toy prizes and getting name-checked by celebrity parents. By 2012 — the year this site dubbed the red-felt fellow “an Orwellian nightmare” and noted that the bogus tradition “reinforces the message to even very young children that the only reason to be good to each other is to get stuff” — the Elf on the Shelf was the newest addition to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In 2014, a paper titled “Who’s the Boss? The ‘Elf on the Shelf’ and the Normalization of Surveillance” was published in the journal of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Authored by Laura Pinto, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Institute of Technology, the paper argued that the Elf on the Shelf was, whether inadvertently or otherwise, indoctrinating children into both expecting and accepting constant surveillance. The elf, wrote Pinto, “essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus.”

Predictably, this was largely dismissed as tin-hat catastrophizing. Writing in the Washington Post, Peter Holley snarkily quoted Pinto’s contention that “the Elf on the Shelf is ‘a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and’ [deep breath] ‘reify hegemonic power’” before going on to reassure readers that Pinto “comes across as extremely friendly and not at all paranoid on the phone.”

Sure, have a performative eyeroll at two-dollar words like “reify” and “hegemony.” But beyond that, where’s the lie? Elf on the Shelf, the paper argued, “presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between play time and real life. Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus.” To tweak a quote from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the Elf on the Shelf isn’t taking notes.

That bit of condescension from The Washington Post appeared the same year Amazon and Microsoft debuted their voice assistants, Alexa and Cortana. Their convenience-focused utility heralded the dawn of the smart home; as we eventually learned, they were also listening, recording and transmitting users’ voices, shopping lists and, occasionally, personal conversations. A technology reporter like Holley treating concern about widespread Elf on the Shelf adoption like crackpot conspiracism perhaps said less about the validity of Pinto’s thesis than it did about the fact that, as a white journalist working in legacy media, he enjoyed a freedom from state scrutiny that many of his peers did not. The Elf on the Shelf was never less than crystal clear about identifying as an informant who was, I repeat, “listening and noting your file”: a proud, rosy-cheeked tool of the surveillance apparatus.

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That apparatus was central to Christmas traditions centuries before this smirking little red-suited suck-up landed on Walmart and Target shelves. Isn’t the Christian concept of Santa Claus — a bearded guy who knows when you’ve been bad or good and hands out judgment accordingly — basically a more festive version of a different bearded guy, the one who art in heaven, similarly omniscient and also in the business of rewarding the good and punishing the bad? There’s certainly been enough open online conflation of Santa and God for AI to suggest “How strong is Santa Claus?” and “Is Santa Claus a deity?” as likely search terms. Plenty of households don’t even bother with an elf intermediary, turning instead to online marketplaces like Etsy that have done a brisk business in “Santa cams” (fake cameras cleverly “hidden” in Christmas-tree ornaments, nightlights and appliances) for years.

There’s also the category of tech that, with unmatched “we heard you like surveillance, so we put some surveillance in your surveillance” energy, lets you watch Santa watching you. This includes apps like CatchSanta (“summon the real moving Santa Claus and capture him leaving gifts under your tree on video”) and Santa Spy Cam (“the third major release of the Internationally acclaimed ‘Proof of Santa’ app”) — both of which owe a debt to NORAD’s Santa Tracker, which this year celebrates its 70th anniversary of using advanced military technology to keep St. Nick in the world’s sightlines.

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— elfontheshelf (@elfontheshelf) November 6, 2025

Pinto’s argument was premised on a vision of Santa Claus that was already so widely accepted it didn’t need to be literalized with fake cameras or radar displays. To believe in Santa is to acknowledge a world in which spying and informing are a common mode of communication. To live in this world and not acknowledge that seems, frankly, way more out of touch than wondering if your children might feel weird about an elf taking up residence in their home for the express purpose of tattling his tiny ass off to Santa.

When I asked various group texts whether they had done Elf on the Shelf with their kids, I wasn’t surprised to hear a lot of firm, anti-authoritarian nos (“We don’t celebrate Christmas. Or snitches”) but a number of folks also just don’t want to add more truth-telling traps to their holiday repertoire. (“I immediately caved when my daughter asked point-blank about Santa. I couldn’t lie to her face.”) And maintaining the elf illusion, one friend pointed out, means fitting another undertaking into an already packed and labor-intensive schedule of making Christmas magic. (“I also refuse to allow ‘leprechaun traps,’” she added.)

The idea that it’s somehow unsporting to identify The Elf on the Shelf as an embedded agent gathering yuletide intelligence is made more notable by some of the speculation about its origins. Specifically, one theory about the Elf on the Shelf is that it’s an Americanized, consumer-friendly — and way less terrifying — adaptation of European folklore’s Krampus, a pagan half-man/half-goat figure who beats naughty children with birch-tree branches, absconds with them to the underworld and drowns or eats them. Gen X peers who grew up in Southern Austria, one friend texted me, recalled that “parents would leave them at home during the Advent season and tell them that they better be good or Krampus would come to steal them away. It’s a little more ominous than Elf on the Shelf, but I see a connection.”

Sanding down the hard edges of an all-seeing, child-eating demon by rebranding it as a cute but voracious data collector seems, if anything, a bit on the nose for these times. Recent revelations about the practices of companies like Meta that have not only allowed its technology to prey on children but in many cases designed it to do so are stomach-turning portraits of executives who actively abetted child predation, abuse, sexual extortion and suicide, and ignored or even punished employees who stepped forward as whistleblowers. It would be great, honestly, if more people were willing to describe such behavior as evil and demand accountability from those who perpetuate it.

Learn how Frost Pips bloom, how Scout Elves care for them and fun ways to include these tiny elf babies in your family’s tradition.​ Read more: https://t.co/qmNcvNiuPL pic.twitter.com/92M08l1B4i

— elfontheshelf (@elfontheshelf) November 27, 2025

The reason that very little accountability and even less reform have followed these reports, of course, is that naming the harm gives away the game. Surveillance capitalism is the tech revolution’s killer app: a galaxy of products and services that lets us streamline, personalize, gamify and optimize our lives at the low, low cost of all the personal data that companies can harvest. We might not directly profit from it, but we’re an essential part of the permission structure for those who do.

The Elf on the Shelf did not start this particular fire, and plenty of families have incorporated the little guy into their holidays in ways that, in downplaying or even eliminating the spying-for-Santa storyline, have tilted the vibe from creepy to cute. Still, 20 years on, the curious insistence on waving away its messaging looks more than a little naive. If the Elf on the Shelf debuted today, amid a rash of cavalier war crimes, extrajudicial immigration “enforcement” and the catastrophic toll of DOGE, maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to call it harmless, heartwarming family fun. But in a world where trading away our privacy for convenience is already a habit, we also wouldn’t be giving that elf much to report.