Kerry Langan and friend
The Saturday Evening Post is celebrating its 200th anniversary. Norman Rockwell painted 323 covers for the magazine, including some of Santa Claus 100 years ago. The current online edition, too, has a Christmas story in it. It’s by Kerry Langan, a Buffalo-born writer of short fiction.
“Tattletale” is the story of Richie, a boy who is haunted by his family’s Elf on the Shelf. As you may know, the elf doll is sold with a book of the same name that tells how the little elven spy reports back to Santa on whether children have been naughty or nice. Annual sales run around $10 million, according to The Atlantic, which calls it “a marketing juggernaut dressed up as ‘tradition.’ ”
Langan’s story revolves around little Richie’s desire to capture the creature and stuff it into a neighbor’s trash bin. That sounds naughty, of course, though the plush pixie’s many critics – who see it as an agent of the surveillance state – might classify it as justifiable elf-napping.
People are also reading…
Langan grew up in South Buffalo in the 1960s. The Elf on the Shelf didn't make its first appearance in American pop culture until 2005.
“I wanted the story to evoke the sensibilities of my era but incorporate the Elf,” she says by phone from her home in Oberlin, Ohio. Mixing time frames is a prerogative of fiction, of course, and placing her story in a bygone time fits the sepia-toned Americana for which the Saturday Evening Post is known.
“So many people have said to me, ‘I’m glad that Elf wasn’t around when we were kids,’ ” Langan says. “I remember a moment of weakness when my daughters were little and I told them if they misbehaved I would call Santa at 1-800-NORTHPOLE. But they didn’t believe me. They laughed.”
Langan, 64, graduated from St. Martin of Tours School, Nardin Academy and Canisius College. She earned a master’s degree in library and information science at the University at Buffalo. She later worked for a decade as an academic librarian at Oberlin, a private liberal arts college and music conservatory.
“But I really wanted to write,” she says. “I was taking every spare moment doing that. One day I had a talk with my husband and he said, ‘You know, you really ought to consider doing it full time.’ And so, at 35, I did just that.”
Langan has three collections of short fiction – “Only Beautiful & Other Stories,” “My Name Is Your Name & Other Stories” and “Live Your Life & Other Stories.” (You can order them on her Amazon page here.) Her work has appeared in more than 40 literary journals.
Her first published story, “The Comet,” is set in Buffalo at a time when the amusement park at Crystal Beach was still offering thrills on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie.
Jake, the narrator, is a 19-year-old art student at SUNY Buffalo State. He loves the Comet roller coaster, the park’s premier attraction: “It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of these new coasters, no special effects or stuff like that. But at the beginning of the ride, you go up the steepest hill real slow. When you get to the top, you stop for a few seconds, and then BANG! You’re going downhill so fast the wind jumps right out of your body. The best part, though, is that the Comet is right next to Lake Erie. After you go down the big hill, the coaster jerks right all of a sudden and you think you are going to land in the lake. No matter how many times you ride it, you always think, this is it, this time we derail and fly into the lake.”
“Only Beautiful” is set in South Buffalo. It is a story of secrets. You can see Langan read from it, and talk about her childhood neighborhood, on this YouTube clip.
“Tattletale” is best categorized as commercial fiction, Langan says, outside her usual turf in literary fiction. She didn’t know for sure where to submit it, then wondered if it might be a good fit for the Saturday Evening Post. Editors there agreed.
“I heard on a Tuesday that they were accepting it,” Langan says. “And an editor called on Wednesday and said, ‘We’re going to put it on the website on Friday.’ I never expected things to move that quickly. But now I’ve heard from people I knew growing up in South Buffalo with whom I haven’t been in contact in years.”
The city where Richie and his family live is not specified in “Tattletale.” Langan says it’s not necessarily Buffalo. She thinks of it as Anywhere, USA.
“I had the voice of Ralphie, from ‘A Christmas Story,’ whispering in my ear,” she says. “It’s that kind of tone.”
The publisher’s note on “Only Beautiful” says Langan’s stories “capture those fleeting moments when a child experiences a revelation about the world.” And so it is with “Tattletale.” His parents catch Richie in a lie when he denies offing the Elf. But then he discovers that the Elf itself is an elaborate fabrication.
“My mother was lying and that shocked me,” Richie says. “I didn’t know parents could lie.”
Oh, they do. But does the Elf on the Shelf ever rat out the parents? Heck, no. They’re the ones buying all those confederate elves.
