Like most American households with inhabitants under the age of 12, we have an Elf on the Shelf. From mid-November until last Saturday, we counted the days, hours and minutes until he would make his annual December 1st debut.
When we brought our elf home two years ago, I had high hopes that his presence would, as the brightly illustrated, irritatingly rhyming book that accompanied him suggested, encourage our kids to tow the line for at least 25 days out of the year. I don't even bother reminding them that the elf is watching any more, as he's watched them argue, whine and blatantly disobey for the past two years and yet Santa has still made substantial deposits under our tree each time. Oh well.
What the book also suggests is that this elf is supposed to sit (sit!) on a shelf (a shelf!) and observe. He can't talk, and he can't be touched (sensory processing disorder, perhaps?). He's just supposed to sit. On a shelf. Hence the name, right?
Wrong.
Each morning for the past week, our neighbor carpool pals have skipped through our front door and immediately begun to regale my kids with stories of where they've found their clever (and sometimes naughty) elf.
This morning, he had commandeered the family's shoes, arranging them like train cars under the tree and coaxing the kids' stuffed animals into hopping aboard while he played conductor. Two mornings ago (or was it yesterday? I've lost track.) he was riding a Lego dirt bike up a ramp of brightly-wrapped gifts. The day before that, they caught him with a Barbie on his lap (naughty elf, indeed.)
That elf is making ours look like a first-rate dud. Our elf sits. On shelves. Sometimes he moves from one to another but always (until yesterday when the beginnings of an inferiority complex finally drove him to swing trapeze style from our dining room chandelier. My daughter's response when they found him hanging there like a little red bat? "Our elf finally did something funny!" My son's? "Yeah. That's kind of funny. I guess." ) he just sits.
In his defense, our elf has to find a perch at least a few feet off the ground to avoid getting spirited away and possibly dunked in the toilet by our 16-month old, who poos-poos rules in general and would thus have no qualms in breaking the "no touching" rule.
Beyond that, I'm going to guess that our elf is tired from all his flying back and forth to the North Pole to tell Santa how ornery our kids are (not that it matters) and does well to climb back up to his shelf when he makes his move each morning at 5:00. Or maybe he's tired from all those loads of laundry he's been doing for me in the wee hours of the night. If anyone has a line on that kind of elf, please share the love.
And if anyone has any suggestions for clever, exciting and/or naughty stunts our elf could pull off between now and Christmas morning, send those along too. If I'm, I mean he's, not too exhausted, we may just give them a whirl.
