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The Elf on the Shelf may be a popular sight around the Christmas season — but it wasn’t an easy path getting there.
This peculiar looking doll, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, is actually based on a book, wherein the elf “watches” kids for good behaviour leading up to Christmas. Kids believe that the elf reports back to Santa every night about who deserves to be on the naughty or nice lists.
But 2005 wasn’t so nice for the company’s founders. Bloomberg reports that this is when Carol Aebersold and her twin daughters, Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts, created the book The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition paired with the doll. Neither publishers nor bankers wanted in.


