Illustrations by Rebecca Hayes
T
hink it’s dangerous to catch King Crabs in the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska? It is, asshole. You know what else is dangerous? Working as an elf. You’re employed a few weeks out of the year, under terrible conditions, for a crazy man who pays you nothing, who barely turns on the heat, who then makes you dance on the ice for him, as he sips his spiked eggnog, cackling.
What we’re saying is that elves die on the job all the time. It’s a miserable, horrible life, not nearly as glamorous as the National Geographic documentaries portray.
What follows are the most common manners of Elf Demise (not including the elf hate-crimes that so frequently occur in rural areas):
- High-speed texting-while-sleighing
- Figgy pudding overdose
- Being found dead in North Pole flophouse, surrounded by 11 crack pipers piping
- Cancer of the ornament
- Killed by jealous girlfriend in murder-suicide after discovery of another woman’s curly-toed slippers
- Auto-erotic asphyxiation with a Slinky
- Consuming a fatal mixture Pop Rocks and Coke (and meth)
- Same reason all those Chinamen die all the time at the Apple iPad factory. Overwork?
- Sharing of infected ornament hooks
- Dick cancer
- Have you seen that documentary Zoo? Instead of horse, think reindeer.
- Killed in a hail of bullets during a sugarplum deal gone sour
- Trapped beneath a snowdrift on Gumdrop Mountain, being eaten alive by ravenous elf friends
- Eating a poinsettia to impress the lil’ Elf dames
- Gutted by Blitzen
- Passing a kidney coal
- Choking on vomit due to eggnog poisoning (“Freshman Elf” hazing incident)
- Tragically caught in café bomb blast after moving to Israel to study the Talmud
- Infection caused by ingrown curled toe boots
- Air embolism caused by blowing into elf vagina during elf cunnilingus
- Jingling only part of the way
- Candy cane in the urethra / North Pole ICU sees this thing all the time
- Victims of illegal "Elf Fighting" ring
- Drinking too many thimbles of gooseberry cider, then wrapping Subaru Impreza around a goddamn telephone pole
- Crushed to death beneath a loose skid of overstocked Pogs
- OD’ing on a bad batch of Moroccan myrrh
- Just died. Who gives a shit how?
This article was originally published December 2012