December is a wonderful time of year for many reasons, not least because it brings an influx of movie-related press releases that seem determined to crush the joy out of everyone’s favourite Christmas films with the sheer brute force of unchecked capitalism.
There’s one doing the rounds now, about the film Elf. Elf is, of course, a touching and heartfelt comedy about family and belonging and the magic of belief. But not according to Skills Trading Group, which just sent out a mailer that boils the plot of the film down to a concrete amount of cold hard cash that Buddy the Elf would have earned had he been real.
The release carefully goes through each basic duty of a traditional Christmas elf, and assigns it a monetary worth in the form of an hourly salary. So, for example, designing and making toys for a living will currently get you £24.61 an hour, while sorting Santa’s mail in a warehouse earns £12.61 an hour. The other tasks include being a stablehand for the reindeer (£10.01), being both a baker (£11.12) and a candy maker (£9) and being a sleigh mechanic (£19.71). Therefore, by taking all of these tasks into consideration, an elf can expect to earn an hourly salary of £14.46. Better yet, thanks to a prodigious work ethic that means they work for 18 hours a day, a Christmas elf can expect to earn an annual salary of £94,348.80.
And even better yet, this gives us a figure to cross-reference with the website Santatracker.net, which estimates that Santa Claus currently employs 110,000 elves, all of them on roughly three times the average UK salary. Assuming that every elf works year-round to prepare for Christmas, this means Santa Claus has an annual wage liability of more than £10bn. Obviously we can expect this figure to go down in the near future, as the sophistication of AI improves and much of the workforce is slung on to the scrapheap.
But this is about Elf. And, it has to be said, this study takes an awful lot of liberties with the fundamental truth of Elf, which is that Buddy the Elf wasn’t actually an Elf at all. He was a human who was accidentally raised as an elf, and therefore it would be unlikely that his productivity would be equal to a biological elf. Indeed, the first tract of the film shows Buddy struggling manfully to complete even a fraction of the basic elf output. Were the Skills Trading Group figures even vaguely performance-related, then it goes without saying that Buddy wouldn’t be earning anywhere close to £94,348.80.
Nevertheless, Santa Claus is a kind and egalitarian man, so perhaps £94,348.80 is the flat rate that he pays elves, regardless of the quality of their work. This doesn’t seem like a particularly effective method of conducting a payroll, because without proper financial motivation the elves would slowly devolve to the output of the worst worker, putting all of Christmas in danger. However, Santa is as Santa does, and that should not be questioned.
Getting back on track, Will Ferrell was 36 years old when Elf was released, so we can assume that Buddy was the same age. A Reddit thread I just looked at suggested that elves don’t become physically mature until the age of 20. That means that, realistically, Buddy had earned a total of £1,509,580 by the time he left the North Pole to venture out in search of his biological father. Based on their arrangements in the film, along with the lack of retail opportunities, it seems as if the cost of living in Santa’s workshop would be remarkably cheap, so Buddy may well have retained the bulk of that cash when he arrived in New York.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Buddy’s father Walter was a children’s book publisher by trade, a role that the website Payscale estimates comes with an average salary of £80,000. And this means that Buddy the Elf would significantly out-earn his father.
With this in mind, perhaps we’ve been getting Elf wrong all these years. Perhaps Elf isn’t really a touching and heartfelt comedy about family and belonging and the magic of belief after all. Perhaps it’s a cold hard message about the relentless power of cash. Perhaps it’s a chilly fable about earning more money than your parents, so you can taunt them with all your material belongings. Perhaps it’s a reminder that family is nothing and wealth is everything. Yes, that’s it. Thanks, Skills Trading Group! Merry Christmas!
