Please Help Me Find A Story

please help me find a story

so I've been looking for a specific creepypasta for years now. Like, going on 7 or so years now? I remember a lot of details I swear were part of the story, but its been long enough that I suggest taking the details with a grain of salt. It's possible I may be mixing up certain things.

I found it on a creepy pasta wiki of some kind. The site had a kinda grey and red color scheme. It also had a creepy pasta of the month section? Or maybe an author of the month? I found it in a section like that, and I think I remember the authors name being umbrello? Though that may be unrelated.

The story was really really long. Like, it would take several minutes to scroll through a whole page, and it was multiple pages long. I think it was about 17 pages long?

The story was set in a mall before Christmas time. It mentioned that in one wall of the mall was this mural of an old man that was noted as being really creepy. The MC was a guy who worked in the mall, and the store he worked in was near a candle shop? Because it was near Christmas there were a lot of elf on the shelf dolls around the store.

The horror part happens when the guy gets dragged into a game with some kind of evil entity haunting the mural, I think. The entity would send out monsters in the store that would hunt this guy and the customers, especially his friends I think? If the monsters successfully stole someone from the store and dragged them into the mural, the entity won that round. The guy could only fight them off using things he found in the store, anything he took from outside would disappear.

The elf on the shelf dolls were also kinda haunted in some way? They acted as the referees of each round. They would wipe the customers memories after each round, and get rid of any evidence of the monster attacks. I think they also punished any cheating somehow?

The guy spent the first few rounds struggling to figure out the rules and fight the creatures. But I do think he won once or twice? He did end up losing too many times eventually, and the old man mural entity was going to keep his the people it stole forever.

But the guy made a deal or something and was able to get into the entities world to fight it himself, and if I remember right he beat it? My memory is pretty fuzzy on that part.

If I recall correctly, he mentioned a lot through flashbacks and stuff that his mom was a writer of some kind when he was a kid. He mentioned that her story had a character who fought monsters too. And during the final fight (I think), he finally remembered how the character in his moms stories beat the monsters. It had something to do with peppermint I think? Which was obviously everywhere because it was almost Christmas.

I think the story ended with mentioning the old man was gone from the mural, and it generally had a happy or positive feeling ending? I remember that as being part of why it stuck with me, I think.

Ive looked for every combination of Christmas, creepypasta, old man mural story, any key words I could think of. I even tried the wayback machine once, just in case I was right about the author name and they just deleted the story or something.

Its been driving me nuts that I can't find this story and I don't know anyone else who can confirm it's existence. If anyone else on here has read it and knows what I'm talking about, please tell me, or share a link. I want to know I didn't just dream up a huge story as a middleschooler somehow.