Santa's NSA adventure

Have you heard about this “Elf on the Shelf” character? Perhaps I should say Elves on the Shelves. There are definitely more than one.

I hadn’t until this year.

Apparently elves appear on east coast shelves more than out here in the west (or in the south for that matter). Probably a denser population thing. Can’t overtax Santa’s attitude meter can we?

The deal is that elves, which appear to be figures made of ceramic, wood or cloth during the daylight hours, keep an eye on the children of the house and report back to Santa during the night.

When he is done rat-finking on your children’s good/bad behavior quotient every night he comes back and sits in a different spot on the shelf. This repositioning is meant to prove to your children that the reports have been made each night.

I’m kinda surprised no one has made an “Elf on the Shelf” nanny cam yet (Be sure to give me a percentage when you get around to making one).

Holiday spying at its best! I’ve always wondered what the psychological effects of being under surveillance all the time are. Does feeling like you’re being watched all the time creep you out at all? It sure gives me the willies. But I digress …

Of course this legion of shelf elves has nothing on the original intelligence gatherer, Santa Claus.

Santa has known who is naughty or nice for a long time now. He has been making lists since way before the Coca-Cola company got Santa to change his apparel from plain white to Coca-Cola Red in 1931.1 By the way, that product placement deal was so lucrative and famous that bootleggers of the time decided to cash in too and began putting advertisements on their cars and apparel—effectively creating NASCAR.2

During my exhaustive (at least I was exhausted) research on the subject of how Santa determines exactly who is naughty or nice. I found zip.

Nada.

Zilch.

Nothing.

I am guessing Santa’s security is pretty good. He may use a crystal ball, witchcraft, telepathy or he may just have a direct line to God. As we see from earlier in this column though, elves definitely play a part in the whole thing. Maybe just they “peek in” on the rest of us without sitting on our shelves. If I ever catch one of these sneaky little guys I’ll let you know. I have several traps baited with gingerbread.

Seeing the benefits of having someone who knows what most of the children on earth are doing and thinking, the National Security Agency (NSA) began recruiting Santa for their intelligence-gathering program dubbed “Nose in Your Business” in early 2003.

Getting clearance for a pipe smoking3 foreigner with an unbelievably long list of aliases4 and differing methods of operation around the world took a lot of time—and Santa was not officially cleared to join the NSA until mid 2008.5

This stint with the NSA afforded Santa a little more cash than normal but ended in 2010 when Santa was caught, red-mittened, sifting through the NSA’s collected metadata on American citizens.

Though he claimed it was his right (as he had collected quite a bit of the data for them), intelligence agencies are fiercely protective of their information and, in the end, the red suit was given the pink slip.

This did not deter Santa in his jolliness6 though and he went back to his normal life of spreading joy and collecting royalties from all the Santa-related Christmas songs.

Did you know that Santa gets 5 cents on the dollar for every “Here comes Santa Claus” or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” you sing?7

Though Santa is fast approaching his 1,735th birthday8 the old Father Christmas is showing no signs of slowing down. Even now his staff of letter-readers is preparing to translate the millions of nearly indecipherable9 letters he gets every year. Santa himself is currently doing pilotes pillatees yoga to get into chimney shimmying shape.

So get ready too. Christmas is coming whether you like it or not. And don’t even bother trying to hide your shames, ’cause Santa knows.

1. This is actually a popular falsehood according to cocacola.com. Although Haddon Sundblom created the famous Coca-Cola Santa in 1931, Norman Rockwell painted Santa in his familiar white-trimmed red suit as early as 1921. Coca Cola did certainly solidify Santa’s colors though.

2. While bootleggers were the original inspiration for NASCAR, I don’t think Santa delivered the ads to their cars.

3. We’re still not sure what’s in it.

4. Just a few of these are: Sinter Klass or Saint Nicholas (Holland), Sinterklaas (Netherlands) Père Noël (France), Papa Noël (Brazil), Father Christmas (England), Santa Claus or Head Elf (United States), Christkind, an angelic messenger of Jesus—which later became Kris Kringle (Germany), Nisse (Norway), Ded Moroz (Russia), Saint Basil (Greece), Mikulás (Hungary), Tomte (Sweden), Noel Baba (Turkey), Joulupukki (Finland), Befana (Italy).

5. Several senators received lumps of coal in their stockings during this period.

6. What is in that pipe?

7. Even though Santa gets a bit from “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” too, it’s Rudolf who really cleans up on that one.

8. More or less.

9. Usually because they are written good not and wif rotten speelling.