Late last night all of the elves gathered downtown for the North Pole lighting ceremony. It was a great ceremony with elf Wally and his band The Scissors performing a selection of Christmas songs before Santa took the stage and flipped the switch to light up downtown. One elf stayed at home though and assembled what turned out to be the show stopper in last night’s lighting contest.

Elf Monica spent the 3 hours that everyone else was downtown to assemble a fifty foot tall Christmas tree. Her first time turning it on was when Santa and Mrs. Claus came around to judge her house and everyone was amazed by the brightness of the lights, but Monica wasn’t done. She walked over to the tree and said “hello tree” and what happened next will make Monica a legend.

The tree suddenly sprang to life. Branches on the front of the tree lifted up to reveal a face and branches on the side moved to the back to reveal arms. Then the face started moving and it spoke.

“Hello Monica” the tree said. “What can I do for you today?”

“Sing me a song” Monica replied.

Music suddenly came out of no where and the tree began singing “Rockin around the Christmas tree” out loud. It’s arms moved in time with the lyrics and then the whole tree started swaying back and forth. It was hard to believe but the tree was actually dancing.

The elves all stared in awe. No one could believe it. I think everyone knew the competition was over but Santa and Mrs. Claus just stood there writing notes on their clipboards. Then they continued on, judging all of the other houses in the contest without giving any hint of what they were thinking.

Two hours later, everyone once again assembled in the town square to find out who the winner was.
Santa took to the stage and thanked all of the competitors for their hard work. Then he announced the winner.

“Elf Monica” Santa said!!

The elves all let out a loud cheer as Santa handed the golden light bulb to Monica who simply stepped up to the microphone and said “Thank you everyone” before walking off back off the stage.

Monica is pretty shy but I got her to sit down with me after the ceremony. I asked her how long it took to build the tree.

“I’ve been working on it for 5 years now” Monica said. “I started with a 10 foot model and while it was pretty cool, I knew that I had to go bigger if I wanted to win. So I took some measurements in my garage and figured out that I had the space to build a 50 foot tall tree. So that’s what I did. I build robots all day in the workshop so it wasn’t really that hard. It just took so long because it was so big.”

I asked Monica if she had any ideas on how to make her display bigger and better for next year.

“Of course I do” Monica replied. “I’m not going to tell you what they are though. You’ll just have to wait until next year to see.”

-Elf Ernest