As Santa farmed out more and more of the operation to the big tech companies, the elves had less and less to do.
The traditional jobs of cookie-baking and shoe-making had also been automated.
Their ancestral forests long cut down.
And there are so few jobs for mall santa assistants, what, with the malls dying out because of the big tech companies, too.
Idled and furloughed, the elves turned to crime and underground fight clubs.
Bloodied drunk midgets, stumbling the streets at night, stealing hubcaps and hood ornaments to fashion into weapons and drug paraphernalia in their alleyway craft shops.