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She allegedly started her killing spree in the town of North Pole, AK, just outside Fairbanks:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2561025/North-Pole-Alaska-center-sick-story-Satanism-serial-killers-Miranda-Barbour-19-confesses-22-murders.html
Amid these gruesome claims, the tiny Alaskan town of [b]North Pole[/b] has become the center of the outlandish story about satanism and serial killers that Barbour claims began at the behest of a cult leader. Barbour contends she joined a cult aged just 13 [b]in the town of North Pole[/b], where hundreds of news outlets have turned out since the lurid story broke....

What they don’t mention is that North Pole is not your ordinary small town. It is, in fact, the [b]official home of Santa Claus[/b], at least to the US Post Office.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. It is Christmas Day 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. [b]It never stops being Christmas here[/b]. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply “Santa, North Pole”, your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.

The streets have names like Frosty Avenue and Kris Kringle Drive and Santa Claus Lane. The streetlights are decorated with a candy-cane stripe pattern. Volunteers answer all the letters from kids who write to Santa.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
And she has help. Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby Middle School where the town’s 11- and 12-year-olds - the sixth graders - write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum.

Miranda Barbour, then, would then almost certainly have been involuntarily drafted as one of Santa’s elves, and even given her own special elf name. But apparently the job can be emotionally tough at times:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
(Volunteer Debbie) says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears having opened yet another heartbreaker. “Just before you got here,” she says, “I opened one that said, ‘Dear Santa. All I want for Christmas is for my mother and father to stop shouting at each other.’ I just fell apart.”

Another thing they haven’t mentioned yet was an unusual event in that same small town about a year before Miranda allegedly joined the cult: the town was the scene of a serious [b]planned mass school shooting[/b]:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
Six of last year’s Middle School elves, now aged 13, were arrested back in April(2006) for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. ....they had elaborate diagrams and codenames and lists of the kids they were going to kill. .... [b]What turned those elves bad[/b]? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy?

At least a few of the town’s young people aren’t so enthusiastic:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
Her name is Jessie Desmond. ... We meet in a non-Christmassy bar of Jessie’s choice on the edge of town. She’s in her early 20s. She was educated at Middle School.... “Christmas really grates on me, all the time, in the back of my head,” she says. “Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. It drives me nuts.” ....Dusk is falling. One of the town’s two giant Santa sculptures - the one outside the RV park - lights up. Eerily, however, it is lit from below, which gives Santa’s eyes a hollow, creepy look, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

All six of the elves arrested were [b]goths[/b], as were an additional nine elves that were to act in support roles.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-25-school-plots_x.htm?csp=34
Nine other students at the school, [b]including at least one girl[/b], were suspended for withholding information and will not be allowed to return to school until authorities have completed the investigation.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/23/usgunviolence.usa
And they were going to kill dozens of their classmates. This sounds to me like civil war, [b]the non-Christmassy kids against the Christmassy ones[/b].

[Interview with local teen]
“Do you ever get an overdose of Christmas, living here?” I ask him.
“Pretty much all summer,” he says.
“What do you do to redress the balance?” I ask.
“I come here(video arcade) and shoot people all day,” he shrugs.

The question is, did the town’s Christmassy orientation mess Miranda up?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/dec/23/weekend.jonronson1
My week in North Pole has made me suspect that the job can mess you up. There’s poor Twinkle in the lotto shop, constantly in tears, powerless to help. Then there’s Jessie, realising that if she was the magic, then the magic was rubbish.
Jessie told me she wouldn’t be surprised if the plotters were in part set on their nihilistic path as a result of being letter-opening elves.

Did the satanic cult deliberately choose the home of Santa Claus to mock Christianity? Was the cult already entrenched in North Pole at the time of the school shooting plot, perhaps even helped organize it? Or did they move in afterwards, figuring all those goth kids were ripe for recruitment? Interestingly, one the participants said “[b]We were just going to shoot the bad kids[/b],” mirroring Miranda’s comments about just killing bad people.