Welcome back to my two-part defense of the North Pole, where we explore the Christian meaning of Santa and the North Pole through the lens of the movie Elf (and the Bible). In this second installment, we will explore how the movie tackles the same theme of ironic spiritual blindness that we find at the beginning of Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, and in the same way. If you haven’t read Part 1, definitely do that first.
The Census & The Inn
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
— Luke 2:1-7
Now, forget about Elf for a moment. Let’s just try to see if we can understand what Luke is telling us about the birth of Jesus here. One of the first things to remember whenever you’re reading the Bible is: these are not just facts. Of course, we believe these things did really happen. But our modern minds are a little too familiar with the reading of words in textbooks. We collect “facts” in lists so that we can spout them back out at the proper time...when the test comes:
“Census. Traveling. Joseph’s family. Bethlehem. No room in the inn.”
Yes, but that’s not what Luke is doing. He’s not just giving historical data—like, “here are some events that occurred before Jesus was born”—though, of course, he is also doing that. Remember, this is the beginning of the re-enchantment of the world. Luke chose these images for a reason. As with any good story, he’s setting up the scene. Every piece of the puzzle matters if you want to see the bigger picture.
For today, I’m going to focus on two pieces which form a kind of pattern of their own: Caesar’s census and “no room in the inn.” I know it sounds weird, but these two things—the census and the inn—are two different images of the same problem, which form the backdrop of Jesus’s birth…and also of the movie Elf (but more on that to come).
In short, they’re both images of blindness—a willful blindness to the Messiah—but from two different sides, from two different worlds. These parallel with the two worlds Buddy the Elf experiences in New York: the world of the street and world of Gimbells, both of which are blind to the truth about Buddy, but in slightly different ways). In Luke’s Gospel, the worlds are: Rome and Israel. And, if you know the climax of the story, then you know already that there were two groups present at the crucifixion of Jesus, both of whom were responsible for his death: Rome and Israel. And at the very beginning of the story, here they both are.
Not a coincidence.
Now, it’s pretty obvious how “no room in the inn” can be seen as an image of blindness to and rejection of the Messiah. (It’s deeper than you think, and we’ll get to that in a minute…) But first I want to explore the meaning of the census, because it’s easy to miss.
The Trouble With Accounting For Everything
How on earth could a census be an image of blindness? Well, if you were a Jew in Jesus’s time, this would ring a bell, because the Scriptures have a few things to say about census-taking. In the ancient world, a census was usually taken for one of two reasons: taxation or military, either to see how much money you can bring in, or to see how many fighting men you have. And, in the Bible, census-taking has a sort of negative connotation, which has to do with the temptation to overly account for things.
For example, think of Buddy’s father in the city. In a sort of Scrooge-like way, he doesn’t care about Christmastime or his family or anything else. Because he’s focused on counting every dollar, he overlooks obvious things: like the fact that his latest children’s book is missing two whole pages in the middle of the story, or the fact that his own son has just walked into his life (and he had security escort him out of the building). See, when you’re counting the things you can see (because you assume that’s what matters), it makes you even more blind to the things you can’t see, which you assume don’t matter…but they always do. And not just on a moral level.
For instance, imagine you discover that a little bit of Adderall makes you perform better at your job. So then you up the dosage just a little, and you perform even better. So you do it again, and the same thing happens. You’re accounting for what you can see—the short-term improvement in performance—and acting accordingly. But you’re also ignoring what you can’t see: the long term consequences on your health.
In the Bible, you see this sort of pattern happen quite a bit: what is “seen” versus what is “unseen.” And God often reveals himself in the “unseen,” that invisible part of the equation, which you might be tempted to ignore, but which you forget at your own peril.
So how exactly does this relate to the census? Well, there’s a famous passage in 2 Samuel 24 in which King David orders Joab to take a census of all the people of Israel. And Joab is not happy about it, because he knows it’s wrong. How does he know it’s wrong?
For that, you have to go further back to Exodus 30 and Numbers 1, in which God warns Moses about census-taking. Not that doing it is always wrong. In the Numbers passage, God actually tells Moses to do it. But the point is, if you’re going to take a census, you have to do it very carefully. It’s sort of like playing with fire (or Adderall). So God tells them two things: First, when you count the people, atonement must be made—an offering must be given by each person—so that the people won’t be struck with a plague. In other words, when you account for what you can see, you also need to give homage to what you can’t see, or else bad things will happen.
Second, God says, you must never count the Levites (the tribe of the priests who oversee the sacrificial system). Ok, but what does this “atonement” accomplish? And...why not count the Levites? On this idea of “atonement,” we’re going to do a whole episode later, but for now let me just give you a snapshot. The word “atonement” in Hebrew actually means “covering.” Like the covering of blood in the temple sacrifices. But the image of “covering” goes all the way back to the Garden.
When Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes are opened and they see that they need a covering. They didn’t before, because the Garden itself was their covering. But now everything has changed. Now they’re exposed, not just to shame, but to death. Because of their sin, the world is no longer safe.
So what do Adam and Eve do? They make their own coverings, with fig leaves. And what does God do when he finds them? In his mercy, He gives them a new, more costly covering: dead animal skins. Death to protect them from death. Imagine going out into the cold, dark world beyond the Garden with nothing but fig leaves to keep you alive. Their own cheap covering isn’t enough. What God is saying is: only death can protect you from death...just like the covering of blood on their doors at Passover and the sprinkling of blood in the temple. This theme will go all the way through the Bible: our own coverings versus God’s.
As strange as it may sound, that’s what’s going on with the census. David’s census is a kind of false covering. It’s a way for the king to say, “How many fighting men do we have?” Ok, we’re covered. But, no, you’re not. Your own covering, no matter how impressive, will never be enough.
David usually understood this, which is what made his sin, in this case, so great. Before he was king, Saul had offered David his armor as a covering with which to fight Goliath. But David refused, saying that God alone would win the battle. God alone would be his covering. And he was.
Now, quickly to the second point: Why not count the Levites? Well, for starters, the Levites are themselves a kind of offering to God, since their work has to do with the tent of meeting. But there’s more. Another huge theme in God’s law has to do with the necessity of “leaving a margin.” In this case, “Don’t count the Levites,” is a way of saying, “If you’re going to count everyone, make sure you don’t actually count everyone. Leave one part out. Leave one part ‘unseen’ and unknown to you.”
I know, this goes against every modern-precision, data-driven, scientific bone in our bodies. But that should help us to understand the root temptation of census-taking in all of us.
In a lot of ways, we are a census-driven society. I mean, you might want to take a moment and just consider how the patterns of our modern world have shaped us into these totalizing creatures, people who must at all times account for everything we see. Just consider COVID as one example. Think about how we as a society dealt with the terrifying unknowns of the pandemic. How every day and night we fed each other numbers upon numbers upon numbers. The numbers can be useful, of course, but they also tend to blind us from other profound realities which are harder to see and impossible to count. And whatever those unseen realities are, we ignore them at our peril.
That’s what “leaving a margin” means. It opens your eyes to the ways in which you’re blinding yourself. It helps you to see God, because God himself is often on the margin of our experience.
Nobody reads Leviticus for fun these days, but if you did, what you would find is that God’s law isn’t just a list of moral commands. In fact, a lot of the commands don’t seem moral at all. They seem more like arbitrary rituals…until you start to see the deeper pattern. God isn’t just giving rules. He’s giving a new pattern of being--calling people back to the patterns he introduced when he created the world. If you asked an ancient Israelite, why you shouldn’t always be counting everything, he probably wouldn’t know how to explain it. He might just say, “Oh, you mean the Sabbath. Six days God labored, and on the seventh he rested. And so do we.”
See, the Sabbath is the margin at the end of each week. It represents the unaccounted-for part of existence. In the ancient world, when the food you eat comes by the sweat of your brow, to rest is to trust. Part of the effect of working six days and resting on the seventh is that it forces you and your whole community to participate in a pattern of trust, a rhythm which reinforces the fact that you are not completely in control of your circumstances. That no matter how hard you work and no matter how much you produce, there will always be a margin, something left out, a realm that is outside of your care and control. Because you are not God, you cannot and should not account for everything. The Sabbath is a way of not obsessively totalizing, a way of saving us from ourselves. (Remember that next time you get mad at Chic-Fil-A for not being open on Sundays!)
And this Sabbath pattern repeats itself in subtle ways throughout the Torah, not just in God’s commands about the seventh day. And not just in his warnings about census-taking. The pattern is everywhere.
For example, God’s people are told to leave the margin of their fields un-harvested for the sake of the poor and the sojourner and to leave the margin of their garments unfinished and to let the edge of their beards and their sideburns go uncut. Each of these commands might seem random on its own, but not when you see the pattern. These unfinished margins, like the seventh day of each week, are the actual enactment of the belief that man does not live by bread alone.
You can almost see how, if you were to obey these commands, to embody these patterns over time, your whole life and your whole community could become a kind of living reminder to trust in God and not in yourselves. Not to be fooled into thinking that what you can see and touch and hold and count is all there is. What does Jesus say?
The kingdom of God is like a man who spreads seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he knows not how.
— Mark 4:26-27
The point: You cannot account for everything, and oftentimes, when you try to, you miss the most important thing.
So...again, in the beginning of Luke 2, what we find is that Caesar Augustus is taking his own census. Hopefully you can see now that this is not just a random fact. The census is telling us something profound about the world into which Jesus was being born. If David’s census was an assault against God, Caesar’s is a whole new level.
Luke tells us that, according to Caesar’s decree, everyone in the known world is to be registered. The power and the hubris of Rome, to account for every living being, reminds Luke’s audience of the god-like reign of Caesar and the almost despairing place of the people of God in light of that. Not only do the godless rule, but they scoff at the very notion of the one true God and his commandments. And, what is worse, they do it without consequence. They count and recount their victories and leave nothing un-accounted for. Where is the justice of God?
But the genius of this moment in the story is that we, the readers, know that there is something un-accounted for. A secret which began to take shape in Nazareth is making its way to Bethlehem. The voice of Gabriel spoke to Mary in chapter one, saying,
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
— Luke 1:31-32
Something un-accounted for is breaking in. Caesar’s undoing--the perfect punishment for his census-taking hubris--is about to be born into the world.
And, yes, Mary and Joseph must obey his decree for now, because Caesar is still a successful pretender. But the return of the king is underway. The One in Mary’s womb is bringing a kingdom of his own, for which there is no accounting. Because it is the kingdom of God.
So that’s the meaning of the census.
The North Pole’s “Joyful Accounting”
Now, here’s a funny way that Caesar’s census relates back to Santa and his elves. This is a bit subtle, but have you ever noticed, in pop culture versions of the North Pole, how they’re always accounting for things? Santa is…
Making a list Checking in twice Gonna find out who's naughty and nice
Even in the movie Elf, the elves have their inventories, quotas, and due dates. Buddy seems to be holding things up because he can’t make toys fast enough, etc. All of this “accounting” would seem to be a dim reflection of the sin of Caesar’s census in Luke 2, no?
Well, no. Quite the opposite.
See, the beauty of North Pole “accounting” is that it’s done with a different spirit entirely. Sure, Santa is “making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice,” but have you ever met a kid that was too naughty to be visited by Santa on Christmas Eve? No, you haven’t. Because the North Pole accounts for things differently. It operates, first and foremost, in the unseen: the margin of grace and joy (“Ho ho ho”) and magic. The elves are not accounting for revenues and fighting men. They’re counting toys which they give as gifts to children in celebration of the day Jesus was born into the world. All counting and quotas in the North Pole are done with laughter, singing, and forgiveness, because they see what the world cannot. They’re not marching to the beat of some man-made bottom line. They’re dancing to the spirit of Christmas.
So the theme of “North Pole accounting” in our Christmas stories, movies and songs—far from imitating Caesar’s totalizing spirit—is a playful, satirical indictment of Caesar and Rome and all other forms of worldly accounting which, in their obsession with “serious” things, miss the most important thing of all. Elf-accounting is the opposite Scrooge-accounting, because elves count for others, not for themselves. And because their counting is rooted in love, they count joyfully.
As C. S. Lewis famously said, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” The same could be said of the North Pole. And where did Lewis and Santa get this strange idea, you ask? From the angels visiting shepherds on that first Christmas night in Luke Chapter 2: “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy…”
No Room In The Inn
The second piece of the puzzle is the inn, which is much more straightforward (have no fear). If the census had to do with the blindness of Rome, the inn has to do with the blindness of Israel.
As Luke makes clear, Bethlehem is the City of David, from whose line the Messiah was expected to come. In fact, the prophet Micah foretold that Bethlehem would be his birthplace:
But you, Bethlehem, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from ancient times.
— Micah 5:2
In other words, Jesus’s birth is the return of the king, which all Israel has been waiting for. And yet...when the day finally arrives, there’s no room for him in the inn? I mean, you cannot exhaust the weight and meaning and irony of that phrase.
Consider. What is an inn? It’s not just a home. It’s a place particularly set aside to house weary travelers. So the place whose job it was to welcome them in…has no place for them. In fact, there’s another theory which states that the inn was not really a public place, but more likely a “guest room” in the house of Joseph’s relatives. But, in this case, the meaning is all the more stark: it’s not just the City of David but the very Family of David, which has no room for the Son of David. To take it even further, the word Bethlehem means “House of Bread.” So the House of Bread has no room for the Bread of Life.
Of course, you can hardly blame the hosts in Bethlehem. People were flooding in for the census. They’re just doing their job, right? But isn’t that everyone’s excuse, all the time? Why do any of us miss the most important things? Isn’t it because we’re just trying to get by, just trying to do our jobs?
This is exactly what happens with Israel. The inn in Bethlehem foreshadows the tension of Jesus’s entire ministry, which is that, even amidst his own people, there’s no room for him. Whether it be the Pharisees, who knew the Scriptures better than anyone but still rejected him…or his own disciples, who saw every miracle he performed, and yet still struggled to understand what he was doing. They were looking for the Messiah. They hadn’t totally forgotten. They knew the stories. God was supposed to bring justice. Their king was supposed to reign, not Caesar. But what happened? When the king really did appear, they almost missed him. Like the innkeeper flooded with guests, their attention was focused on other things. The ones who should have been most ready to receive him were caught unawares.
There’s an odd parable where Jesus talks about this.
The kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins, who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. The foolish ones took no oil for their lamps. The wise ones did. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all fell asleep. Then, at midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ But only a few of them could. That is, the ones who remembered to bring oil. Therefore keep watch, for you do not know the day or the hour. — Matthew 25:1-13 (paraphrased)
At first glance, this seems like a parable about the future coming of Christ. And it probably is, but it was also obviously a parable about what was happening as Jesus spoke. About those who were not ready for him, even though they had been waiting for him.
The Christian celebration of Advent has this same already-not-yet structure to it. We sing O Come O Come Emmanuel in a minor key, imagining ourselves as Israel long ago, waiting for the king to arrive: “Rejoice, Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” But the longing is also our own, since we too wait for the day when He will come again and wipe every tear from our eyes. We sing, “Joy To The World, The Lord Is Come,” knowing that he did come 2000 years ago, but also imagining and enacting the day when He will come and make all things new. Christianity is not just a past-tense religion. The thing we celebrate is either real now or else it isn’t real at all.
So the question is: Will we miss him when he comes? And if so, will it be the blindness of Rome or blindness of Israel? In terms of Elf, will it be the blindness of Buddy’s father or the blindness of Gimbells?
Sometimes we resemble the blindness of Rome. Like Caesar and Buddy’s father and Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s tempting to keep counting and to convince ourselves that whatever we’re counting is all there is. The world around us will continue its census-taking all through the Christmas season—counting dollars and COVID cases and the like—all the while blind to the real meaning and magic of Christmas. Will we join them? Or will we leave a margin for the unknown, for the magic of Elfland, which is really the magic of Christmas, which is really the Spirit of Christ?
Of course, many of us know this already. We are not so much Rome as Israel. That’s why, in anticipation of the coming of the king, we put up lights and decorations, we give gifts and have feasts and sing songs and read stories. And that’s exactly what we should do. We are the people of God in the city of God, which is his church. But would we recognize Him if he came?
In the movie, the Department Store is really good at playing the Christmas game. They have all the trappings. They even call the place the North Pole. There’s no other place in New York where Buddy should feel more at home. But it’s at Gimbells, not out in the streets, where Buddy finally flips out. It was one thing for people to ignore him or to think he’s weird out in the world. It was another to put on a whole show as though Santa’s really coming to town, only to find out that no one actually believed he was. It was only a show.
Of course, the show would have been fine. Buddy was right at home with all the decorations. He knew it wasn’t the North Pole. But it was a way of bringing part of the North Pole down, preparing the way for Santa himself would come down. That’s why Buddy stayed up all night decorating: to prepare the way. But if no one believes he’s coming, or worse, if everyone settles for some pathetic replacement of the real thing, then what does it all mean?
Like wearing too much makeup, all the Christmas-y traditions and decorations can either be something to enhance the beauty of a really beautiful thing...or else a way of covering over the fact that there’s no real beauty there at all. Only pretending.
Is that what the magic of Christmas is? Only pretending?
The world into which Jesus was born was a world of census-taking and “no room in the inn.” A world full of people who either didn’t care or else pretended they did. Both missed Jesus. Both called him an impostor: Israel and Rome. In the end, both nailed him to a cross. Yet, in doing so, both came face-to-face with the God who made them, whose plan had always been to replace their cheap false-coverings with the covering of his own death—death protecting them from death.
Conclusion: Waiting For The Real Christmas Day
In the climactic scene of Elf, Santa’s sleigh has crashed in Central Park. The only way to get it flying again is, of course, Christmas spirit. The news travels fast through a local news station, and people all over the city begin to sing, “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” One after another, you begin to see every person and group Buddy ever met in the city joining in the song: from the roughest people in the streets to the manager and employees at Gimbells, all of whom thought he was crazy. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Finally, Buddy’s father is the last one to sing, and the sleigh takes off just in time. Buddy has saved the day.
But as Santa’s sleigh comes into view of the news cameras, the reporter’s feed cuts out. The news anchor takes over and says, “I guess we’ll never know for sure what happened this Christmas Eve in Central Park.” It’s a great line, because it perfectly captures the magic of the real Christmas. In a way, what Christ has done to save the world has always been on the margin. You can never quite capture it on camera. That’s why Caesar could never have accounted for it, and neither can we. The baby is born outside the inn, though he is the true Son of David. The Messiah dies outside the city, though he is the true King of the World. The magic of Christmas, like Christ himself, is such that you cannot quite pin it down. Not because it’s unreal, but because it’s more real than you are. The Spirit blows where it pleases. You want to catch it, to hold it in your hand, to prove that it’s as real as you hope. But you can’t, because it holds you.
Finally, notice once again that everything magical about Christmastime tends to reach its height on Christmas Eve, not on Christmas Day. That’s how it always happens in the movies. And how it always seems to happen when you’re a kid. It’s Christmas Eve. You want to go to sleep, because the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll wake up. But you can’t, because you’re too excited. Finally you do get to sleep. And when the morning comes, it isn’t quite everything you imagined. Almost as though the anticipation was better than the thing anticipated. But somehow, that’s ok. It was all worth it. Because we know deep down the anticipation is for something more real than any Christmas morning we’ve had thus far. Ever since that first Christmas morning 2000 years ago, every day is a kind of Christmas Eve. Which means, we can go to sleep knowing that one day, perhaps tomorrow, we will wake up, and it will be Christmas Day—the real Christmas Day—forever.