My Career As A
Door-To-Door Elf

When I was a fourth grader at Iroquois Point Elementary School, my class celebrated the holidays with a Christmas show that we staged in the cafeteria. We opened the show with a matinee performance one afternoon in front of the entire elementary school. Our second, and final, show was later that evening in front of our parents.

Despite its relatively short run, the show was a huge Off-Off-Off Broadway success and garnered rave reviews by parents on the drive home.

With the exception of some Christmas carols, the pageant was completely written by Mrs. Goodman’s fourth grade class. This is perhaps why the Three Wise Men in the show gave baby Jesus an assortment of Hot Wheels, a Barracuda Spy Sub and a G.I. Joe with beard and kung fu grip.

The show closed with a spectacular finale as our own fourth grade version of Neil Armstrong walked onto the stage in full astronaut regalia and planted an American flag next to the manger. We ended the big show with a medley of Christmas tunes that went from “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” into “Mele Kalikimaka” into an incredibly reverent version of “Silent Night.”

There was not a dry eye in the house when the curtain came down…at least not during the evening’s performance in front of our parents. Truth be told, we fourth grade actors were not as focused during the earlier show in front of our classmates. Somewhere between dodging spitballs and listening to the cafeteria ladies cuss and bang their way through kitchen cleanup we lost our concentration during that particular performance.

I remember that a big kid named Clay got to be Joseph in the pageant by virtue of his having the only semblance of facial hair in the entire fourth grade. I don’t recall who had the other roles except that I was one of a team of Santa’s elves. In addition to making toys, we provided comic relief during skits and sang backup vocals for some female angels whose big number was a high-pitched yet rollicking version of “Jingle Bell Rock.”

My elf costume was superb. Thanks to my mom’s sewing skills and a sale on Kelly green felt, I paraded across the stage looking like an actual employee of Santa’s toy factory. My green vest had patches with crossed red-and-white candy canes on them like military insignia from the Candyland Army. And my green felt hat was perfectly pointed with a red brass bell on the tip. I was so proud.

So proud in fact that I put the costume to good use about six months later. In the classified section of Boy’s Life magazine I had seen an ad that read, “Earn big money and valuable prizes selling personalized Christmas cards door-to-door. Send for free kit. No obligation.”

As soon as I read the ad I realized that my life was woefully lacking in big money and valuable prizes. So I gambled a stamp and took my first steps toward becoming a ten-year-old Christmas card salesman.

Now, you don’t have to be Willie Loman to realize that every salesman needs a gimmick. And mine was my Kelly green elf costume. Maybe if you were an anti-Christmas curmudgeon with a heart of stone you would have been able to resist my elfin sales pitch. Maybe. Most of the people living within a mile radius of my house never had a chance. With my catalog of holiday card options (including Hanukkah), pre-teen enthusiasm and green elf suit, it was pretty much a slam-dunk everywhere I went. Usually it was more a matter of how many boxes of cards they would buy.

Not that the job was all cookies and milk (although there was plenty of both). There were nasty little dogs to avoid, empty houses to return to later, and the matter of making sure that the personalized Christmas greetings were correctly spelled in my ordering book. Plus, I had to get folks thinking about Christmas cards in the middle of summer when they were more apt to think about bathing suits and the Baltimore Orioles.

Fortunately, I was fairly driven for a ten-year-old salesman and before the end of the summer I had sold Christmas cards to a majority of the families in my school district. And I was just as diligent when it came time to send in the money and, later, deliver the boxes of cards to my satisfied customers.

When Christmas finally did roll around, I had a tidy sum of my own hard-earned money with which to buy presents. I also received a number of valuable prizes that I had selected from the card company’s gift catalog. My two top prizes were an electric NFL football game and my very first stereo, a big plastic thing with AM/FM radio and record player.

The football game featured little plastic players who were supposed to make tracks for the end-zone when you plugged it in but invariably buzzed around in little circles until they got dizzy and fell on their sides. The game never worked the way it was supposed to but I had fun seeing how far the kicker could make field goals and painting the uniforms to look like replicas of my two favorite teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings.

The stereo, on the other hand, worked like a champ and played all of my favorite 45s for years. I finally replaced it in eighth grade when a friend convinced me that all quality stereos had wood grain finishes and a plug for headphones.

Many years and several stereos later, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had seriously pursued a career as a door-to-door salesman in my adult life. Would I have ended up like Willie Loman or would I now be the king of the personalized Christmas card industry? Who knows? All I can say for sure is that it wasn’t the first job I ever had but it was the first one that didn’t involve leaf raking or lawn mowing. So in a way you could say it was the first job that elevated me from manual laborer to white-collar worker. Or at least Kelly green collar worker.

Merry Christmas, Y’all.