Have You Hugged Your Smurf Today?

As a young girl – perhaps somewhere between five and seven years of age – one of my most prized possessions was a pink shirt with an image of Smurfette on it. It asked, in bold letters, "Have You Hugged Your Smurf Today?" As a child, I adored it. I can still visualize it in my head, can still feel the swell of pride in my young girl chest as I gazed down at it.

Looking back as an adult, I cannot help but feel that the shirt raises a number of important questions. The foremost being, of course, what in the hell is a "Smurf," anyway? I was compelled to turn to the internet – the world’s largest compilation of non-knowledge within which small specks of true information are buried – to seek an answer.

Imagine my excitement when I discovered the website launched by the very creators of the Smurfs! Scrolling through the pages, I found myself growing more and more distressed. There were no answers here! In fact, there appeared to be pure sacrilege. According to these liars, the Smurfs were introduced in a book format, as secondary characters. While I could possibly be persuaded to believe that, the site goes on to detail the launch of the Smurf’s star careers – as singers! Preposterous. Losing hope, I read on to find a final, disturbing reference – and the only one that even attempts to define a Smurf. They are referred to as "the little blue men."

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see a "blue man" that has not been coated with paint. As far as I know, the color blue does not occur naturally in the world of human skin pigmentation. As if this claim weren’t bad enough, they’ve tacked on an even unlikelier genetic variable – that of "little." Now we are to believe that – in the genetic jackpot – the Smurfs happened to end up with BOTH the "blue" gene AND the "little" gene? What kind of fools do these people take us for? Disgusted, I decided to forge ahead with my investigation.

After a disheartening amount of time, I was forced to conclude that there is a conspiracy in place to keep us from learning the true nature of the Smurf being. How else to explain such distracting ploys as adding the adjective "sky" to the descriptor of "blue," or the vague assertion that the Smurfs live "somewhere in the forests of medieval Europe?" You don’t think that – were an entire colony of "sky blue creatures" to build a little village and run about in hats and white trousers, with little tails protruding behind them - people would know EXACTLY where in the forest they were? They’d likely have been burned out of their homes. Of course, true to the conspiratorial nature of the situation, it is also stated that "it is not possible for a human to find the village except when led by a Smurf." Oh – right. Of course not.

I won’t even go into some of the disturbing origins of the Smurf tales, or the ridiculous claims about their natures and customs. It’s getting far too close to destroying my treasured memory as it is. Instead, I’ll address pressing question number two: How would it be possible for the average person to have hugged "their" Smurf on any given day, let alone "today?" First of all, why does the shirt imply that we all have our own Smurfs stashed away? According to the propaganda, these Smurfs are squirreled away deep in the heart of the medieval forest. Not only does the forest pose a challenge in and of itself, but one would have to have a time machine to access the medieval element. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. If not a single one of us has our own Smurf, then why would the shirt even ask if we’d hugged this nonexistent creature? I pondered this for a bit. Is it a code? How did I obtain this shirt, anyway? Was it given to me as a gift? If so, I could have played the unwitting pawn in an elaborate game – but of what?

Second, what was so important about hugging the Smurf that very day? Wouldn’t it have been okay – if one did have a Smurf – to have hugged it the day before? Or to be planning to hug it the day after? Does the shirt imply that a Smurf needs a daily hug? If so, it would be news to me. In all of the paragraphs of suspect and evasive text that I read through, I found not a single reference to a Smurf’s need for daily physical embraces. Nothing was adding up. It was clear that something was being communicated to someone, somewhere – and things were not as they appeared. For the sake of my memory, I’ve decided to conclude that – while I may have been a pawn in someone else’s game – the game itself was undoubtedly an elaborate Smurf preservation and conservation plan. When looked at in that light, the pieces do begin to fall into place….