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Description
Almost as iconic as the fat man himself is Santa's army of little elven sweatshop workers who tire away all year making toys at the North Pole for all the good little children who supposedly exist out there in the world. I'm gonna skip over the broader mythological origins of elves for this blurb because 1: I've red stringed my way across that cork board in a blurb already, and B: I don't think it's really all that relevant to today's topic. Santa's elves very much developed from the era of Victorian Romanticism rather than some direct mythological past. I suppose you could argue that there's an older association with elves and Christmas via the German folkloric figure Perchta, who fills a similar role to Santa Claus and whom Jacob Grimm goes out of his way to identify as the elusive queen of elves. I roll with this for personal practice, and it does lend itself to some fun worldbuilding ideas for Drake Hero, but even if we accept Perchta as an elven queen, she never seems to summon her subjects for anything, and there's really no real link between her Christmas ventures and her elfishness more generally. Think like how we have the Easter Bunny. Most of us see him as an Easter figure who just happens to be a bunny, rather than him being a bunny having any explicit connection to his role in the story itself.

So okay, the first explicit mention to elves in relation to Santa is actually in reference to Santa himself. Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas famously describes Santa as a “right jolly old elf”, which is certainly interesting to note. It seems by this point in his development as a character, he was seen much less as the human saint he originally was, and more as a sort of spiritual creature, which honestly helps explain his elves a lot. This would've been right around the age of Victorian Romanticism and its obsession with fairy culture. This is the same time frame that we see words like “elf”, “gnome”, “goblin”, “sprite”, etc largely get lumped together as one category of supernatural creature, usually some impish little fae hiding under rocks and in bushes just out of sight from the human plane. In this vein, elves were typically seen as small tinkering goobers who helped out around the house when the humans weren't looking. Think of the fairy tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker and you can see pretty clearly where the Santa mythos got the motif.

While making Santa himself a fae creature has since become a pretty popular trope in modern fantasy, we all know the fat man doesn't do any of the hard work himself anymore. Today it's firmly established that he delegates all the toy making to a vague assortment of gnomish folk which as kids we all just accept live at the North Pole. When exactly Santa first recruited his sidekicks is a bit unclear. At this point in the story, most of the articles online will mention that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, drafted a book astutely titled Christmas Elves in 1856. I often see this painted as being the pinpoint origin of Santa's little helpers but… Christmas Elves was never published, and the manuscript has long since been lost to history, so nobody even knows what was actually in this book. I mean okay, I'd imagine there were Christmas elves in it, given the title, but as a writer myself, these mentions always read like a factoid you include to fill up a paragraph's word count when there's already just not that much information to write about. No shade thrown. I mean look at you right now, at the end of a paragraph whose only purpose is to pad for time and make it seem like I know what I'm talking about. I'm afraid you've been thoroughly duped.

Santa's workshop does come into much sharper focus the following year, though. In 1857, Harper's Weekly magazine published a poem titled “The Wonders of Santa Claus”, which explicitly spells out how Santa “keeps a great many elves at work/ All working with all their might/ To make a million of pretty things/ Cakes, sugar-plums, and toys/ To fill the stockings, hung up you know/ By the little girls and boys”. I realize it's just the old-timey grammar, but “keeps a great many elves at work” just sounds horribly dystopian doesn't it? You think the elves have a union? Do they have the same pissy attitudes us retail laborers have during the busy season as their boss demands more and more last minute bullshit? I mean hell, Santa gets all the credit in the end, and the development of Christmas elves in literature kinda just crystallizes here in 1857. At most, articles will cap off with a mention of Norman Rockwell's 1922 illustration of Santa and his elves and how that inspired a 1932 Disney short, or go a little further and credit the 1964 Rudolph stop motion film for the standard modern elf costume silhouette. That's sort of where they've been ever since, never receiving any sort of standard mythos beyond their role in the workshop. I bet you can't even think of a single public domain elf with an actual name. Shame on you, they're up there working their asses off and the least you could do is acknowledge them as individuals.

Wait am I still talking about elves or am I just bitching about my job at the grocery store again-

Design notes, obviously I pulled a lot of design motifs from my previous reference sheets on elves and dwarves. I think a lot of us in the modern day have this instinct to try and separate our image of Christmas elves from “true elves”, whatever that means. Usually we're really just equating “true elf” with “Tolkien elf”, which I think is a bit of an overcorrection (which to be fair, is an overcorrection born from Tolkien’s own scholarly attempts to tackle the elusive elves). The truth is we just don't have a lot on elves out there, and I always like to blur the line a little bit. I think it helps set my world apart from other fantasy works and their attempts at strict Linnaean classification for things which probably never had such clear distinctions in the first place. We actually don't even have to look further than the man himself to get an idea of what a Tolkien Christmas elf would look like. From 1920 to 1943, Tolkien wrote a series of letters addressed from “Father Christmas” as a holiday tradition for his children. Here he has Santa writing to the children about all the silly adventures at the North Pole, usually involving some sort of mischief from his polar bear sidekick, and recruiting his “Red Elves” to defend the North Pole from armies of scheming goblins. Frankly, it's nothing short of adorable to read. You can really feel the passion and love Tolkien had for his kids and how he wanted nothing more to fill their heads with imagination before they got too old for hanging stockings and forgot about silly old “Santa”, who never forgot them.

That all being said, I had a few points of inspiration for the overall outfit designs. For elves in general, I like to look for Bronze Age inspirations, most evident in the armor of the elites, though I also scatter little Nordic Bronze Age Easter eggs about where I can fit them. I also pulled in some references from the gear of Arctic peoples, specifically the armors of the Inuit and Tlingit. Initially, I liked the idea of taking those famous suits of scale mail fashioned from Chinese coins and replacing the coins with jingle bells, but that proved to be a bit of a dead end, so I just resigned the scale mail to the elite’s chest plate thing. Lastly, I looked at burial goods from the Pazyryk Culture, whose most famous representative is the Siberian Ice Maiden. I even used her tattoos for the reindeer glyphs that the agile is hocus pocusing up here. I'd honestly love to get those tattoos myself some day, they're just absolutely gorgeous. That'd be really expensive though, and even my skeptical ass knows getting the tattoos of a mummy rumored to be cursed is just asking for trouble-

Description
Almost as iconic as the fat man himself is Santa's army of little elven sweatshop workers who tire away all year making toys at the North Pole for all the good little children who supposedly exist out there in the world. I'm gonna skip over the broader mythological origins of elves for this blurb because 1: I've red stringed my way across that cork board in a blurb already, and B: I don't think it's really all that relevant to today's topic. Santa's elves very much developed from the era of Victorian Romanticism rather than some direct mythological past. I suppose you could argue that there's an older association with elves and Christmas via the German folkloric figure Perchta, who fills a similar role to Santa Claus and whom Jacob Grimm goes out of his way to identify as the elusive queen of elves. I roll with this for personal practice, and it does lend itself to some fun worldbuilding ideas for Drake Hero, but even if we accept Perchta as an elven queen, she never seems to summon her subjects for anything, and there's really no real link between her Christmas ventures and her elfishness more generally. Think like how we have the Easter Bunny. Most of us see him as an Easter figure who just happens to be a bunny, rather than him being a bunny having any explicit connection to his role in the story itself.

So okay, the first explicit mention to elves in relation to Santa is actually in reference to Santa himself. Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas famously describes Santa as a “right jolly old elf”, which is certainly interesting to note. It seems by this point in his development as a character, he was seen much less as the human saint he originally was, and more as a sort of spiritual creature, which honestly helps explain his elves a lot. This would've been right around the age of Victorian Romanticism and its obsession with fairy culture. This is the same time frame that we see words like “elf”, “gnome”, “goblin”, “sprite”, etc largely get lumped together as one category of supernatural creature, usually some impish little fae hiding under rocks and in bushes just out of sight from the human plane. In this vein, elves were typically seen as small tinkering goobers who helped out around the house when the humans weren't looking. Think of the fairy tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker and you can see pretty clearly where the Santa mythos got the motif.

While making Santa himself a fae creature has since become a pretty popular trope in modern fantasy, we all know the fat man doesn't do any of the hard work himself anymore. Today it's firmly established that he delegates all the toy making to a vague assortment of gnomish folk which as kids we all just accept live at the North Pole. When exactly Santa first recruited his sidekicks is a bit unclear. At this point in the story, most of the articles online will mention that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, drafted a book astutely titled Christmas Elves in 1856. I often see this painted as being the pinpoint origin of Santa's little helpers but… Christmas Elves was never published, and the manuscript has long since been lost to history, so nobody even knows what was actually in this book. I mean okay, I'd imagine there were Christmas elves in it, given the title, but as a writer myself, these mentions always read like a factoid you include to fill up a paragraph's word count when there's already just not that much information to write about. No shade thrown. I mean look at you right now, at the end of a paragraph whose only purpose is to pad for time and make it seem like I know what I'm talking about. I'm afraid you've been thoroughly duped.

Santa's workshop does come into much sharper focus the following year, though. In 1857, Harper's Weekly magazine published a poem titled “The Wonders of Santa Claus”, which explicitly spells out how Santa “keeps a great many elves at work/ All working with all their might/ To make a million of pretty things/ Cakes, sugar-plums, and toys/ To fill the stockings, hung up you know/ By the little girls and boys”. I realize it's just the old-timey grammar, but “keeps a great many elves at work” just sounds horribly dystopian doesn't it? You think the elves have a union? Do they have the same pissy attitudes us retail laborers have during the busy season as their boss demands more and more last minute bullshit? I mean hell, Santa gets all the credit in the end, and the development of Christmas elves in literature kinda just crystallizes here in 1857. At most, articles will cap off with a mention of Norman Rockwell's 1922 illustration of Santa and his elves and how that inspired a 1932 Disney short, or go a little further and credit the 1964 Rudolph stop motion film for the standard modern elf costume silhouette. That's sort of where they've been ever since, never receiving any sort of standard mythos beyond their role in the workshop. I bet you can't even think of a single public domain elf with an actual name. Shame on you, they're up there working their asses off and the least you could do is acknowledge them as individuals.

Wait am I still talking about elves or am I just bitching about my job at the grocery store again-

Design notes, obviously I pulled a lot of design motifs from my previous reference sheets on elves and dwarves. I think a lot of us in the modern day have this instinct to try and separate our image of Christmas elves from “true elves”, whatever that means. Usually we're really just equating “true elf” with “Tolkien elf”, which I think is a bit of an overcorrection (which to be fair, is an overcorrection born from Tolkien’s own scholarly attempts to tackle the elusive elves). The truth is we just don't have a lot on elves out there, and I always like to blur the line a little bit. I think it helps set my world apart from other fantasy works and their attempts at strict Linnaean classification for things which probably never had such clear distinctions in the first place. We actually don't even have to look further than the man himself to get an idea of what a Tolkien Christmas elf would look like. From 1920 to 1943, Tolkien wrote a series of letters addressed from “Father Christmas” as a holiday tradition for his children. Here he has Santa writing to the children about all the silly adventures at the North Pole, usually involving some sort of mischief from his polar bear sidekick, and recruiting his “Red Elves” to defend the North Pole from armies of scheming goblins. Frankly, it's nothing short of adorable to read. You can really feel the passion and love Tolkien had for his kids and how he wanted nothing more to fill their heads with imagination before they got too old for hanging stockings and forgot about silly old “Santa”, who never forgot them.

That all being said, I had a few points of inspiration for the overall outfit designs. For elves in general, I like to look for Bronze Age inspirations, most evident in the armor of the elites, though I also scatter little Nordic Bronze Age Easter eggs about where I can fit them. I also pulled in some references from the gear of Arctic peoples, specifically the armors of the Inuit and Tlingit. Initially, I liked the idea of taking those famous suits of scale mail fashioned from Chinese coins and replacing the coins with jingle bells, but that proved to be a bit of a dead end, so I just resigned the scale mail to the elite’s chest plate thing. Lastly, I looked at burial goods from the Pazyryk Culture, whose most famous representative is the Siberian Ice Maiden. I even used her tattoos for the reindeer glyphs that the agile is hocus pocusing up here. I'd honestly love to get those tattoos myself some day, they're just absolutely gorgeous. That'd be really expensive though, and even my skeptical ass knows getting the tattoos of a mummy rumored to be cursed is just asking for trouble-