How Santa Met the ELFs, by Ben Dasaro

It's the first Sunday of Advent!  The most wonderful time of the year!  I'm not sure How Santa Met the ELFs will make it onto many Advent devotional reading lists, but it's a fun attempt at explaining how Santa met his helpers and how he got all those magical powers.

Ben Dasaro spins a fanciful tale of a kind and curious Laplander named Kris Kringle who investigates what he thinks must have been a meteor falling near his home.  Expecting to see a rock, similar to what he had found on occasions in the past, he found instead an egg-shaped craft, out of which stepped small humanoid beings: ELFs, extra-terrestrial life forms!

He helps out the ELFs, and they decide to stick around.  The snowy clime in Lapland suits them well, and they need some time (centuries) to charge up their ship.  So they befriend Kringle, and he benefits from their wondrous, other-worldly technological powers.  Of course, he doesn't use those powers for his own benefit, but to extend his toy-making and giving to children around the world.

Dasaro writes in a style that, surely intentionally, recalls 'Twas the Night Before Christmas: 

In the land of the Lapps where reindeer pull sleds
Since a child he'd been a thinker, always using his head.
He loved fixing things and making new toys.
He made them for girls. He made them for boys.

Maybe How Santa Met the ELFs isn't destined to be a Christmas favorite generations from now the way 'Twas the Night Before Christmas is, but it's a fun take on Santa.  And Santa's magic. . .  Well, Arthur C. Clarke's third law comes to mind: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  Maybe Santa's magic is really extra-terrestrial technology, straight from the ELFs!


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!