Or are they engaging in some form of mutual aid to distribute items to children?
Santa's work shop
Shop where they perform labor all year
Likely paid in company script
It's a sweat shop and they're indentured servants at best.
They don't appear to be working for any kind of profit motive, since they give away the toys for free (or rather, based on good behavior).
In third grade my dad, who works for the post office was on strike around Christmas and i wrote a short story about the elves striking for school. My teacher fucking loved it. She was my favorite teacher, she really liked my writing and cause she'd read Roald Dahl's The Witches each year she implied that she was a with herself as well going as far as to never wear open toed or pointy shoes. She'd throw a legit 3 extra large pizzas pizza party, retrospectively out of her own pocket whenever the class read 50 books combined. There was a chart in the classroom where you'd mark your name and the book your finished and every time it got to fifty it was pizza day. I personally read something like 70 books within thst school year cause holy fuck did I read a lot and for that she hauled in the TV on wheels, ordered some pizzas and me and a couple friends got to play n64 and eat pizza for lunch break, which was an hour long. Absolutely amazing teacher.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, good and naughty, santa and elf, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
it would be weird narratively and not very magical if Santa bought the toys
