Christmas Elf

I am grateful that our kids were too old to get involved with the little red spy that has crept into the homes of so many in recent years.

I find it strangely ironic in a culture which is obsessed with privacy and almost neurotic about being spied upon by government and large corporations has embraced this whole idea. To teach our children that this little red thing is watching like some big brothers little brother and reporting back to head office all of the apparent misdemeanours is something that is lost on me.

Yes you can call me Scrooge if you like.

When I was a child elves were not that great. Every book we had with a drawing of an elf depicted them as creepy looking little people with very sharp pointy features, they were sneaky and wily, definitely not to be trusted or welcomed into your home.

It is a fairly recent thing that they have morphed into something positive.  They have had an extremely successful makeover by someone; it could be that quite a lot of Christmas movies depict them in a wonderfully jovial way, laboring tirelessly throughout the year to produce the multitude of toys that Santa ho ho heaves around the globe on the 24th.

I fully understand that it is just a bit of fun to add to magic of Christmas and my nephew loves his elf. But I have serious trust issues with those shifty little creatures.

In order to avert an international incident I was required to make a 5:15 am visit to my local supermarket on the way to work today. The store of coffee had finally been exhausted yesterday and required immediate action, so an excursion into retail land was unavoidable.

It is an understatement to say that I don’t like these places; miles of aisles with too much of everything spread over an area the size of Belgium. Just when you have a general layout of the target lodged in your mind and have a clear exit strategy planned, someone somewhere shuffles everything around. This of course is a marketing trick to get you to pass other products while trying to locate your intended purchase. Those with weaker constitution will leave with armfuls of extra produce.

Visiting such a 24 hour establishment at that time of day is a completely different experience than at, say, 10am.

All of the millions of items do not appear on the shelves like presents under the tree, they require a small army of elves to spirit them from the trucks to the storeroom and on into the public area.

At that hour every aisle is cluttered with wheeled cages and packaging, there is a forest of produce being unloaded and stacked by those happy little nocturnal elves. So when you leave your car there must be a mental shift in expectation of the sight which will meet you when the doors swish open.

I am no stranger to this now, the plan is firmly rehearsed and can be executed with Ethan Hunt like efficiency. Obstacles negotiated, target acquired, card accepted and extraction complete.

In an out in 5!

It used to annoy me seeing the mess that is a 5 am store, but now I am grateful that there are people who sleep during the day to ensure our grocery experience is not chaotic. Yes it suits the corporation to have clear aisles at peak times but if it means that the true elves of our society are not sitting on, but stacking shelves then we all win.