It’s that time of year again. Parents are complaining about having to move a toy every night, children are asking for the newly introduced baby elves and I presume that the creators of The Elf On The Shelf are diving into their huge pile of money Scrooge McDuck style.
For us it’s been business as usual.
Last year was our first giving in to the phenomenon and I’ll admit that we may have gotten a little carried away. By “we” I mean “me” but regardless by the end of the season our original new friend had been joined by another that could be played with without fear of magic loss, two others had been given to my daughter by a smitten classmate and subsequently returned and the chorus of “I told you so’s” from those who had warned me not to start were hard to argue with.
As is often the case when I find myself unable to climb out of a hole I then proceeded to pick up the nearest shovel and got back to digging. This picture is from July 24th.
It really wasn’t my fault. The magic elf returned home, the two visitors given back to the kid at school and this guy was tossed into a bin with a bunch of other stuffies that never get played with. I was off the hook for the next eleven months.
You-Tube was to blame, something that I seem to be saying more and more often these days. She saw a video about cinnamon giving them their powers back, found some in the cup board and made a huge mess. In the course of cleaning up this mess the elf ended up in a different spot, my daughter got super excited and a sucker decided that he kind of like the fact that she still believed that such things were possible. Some time around St Patrick’s Day a leprechaun frog showed up and things just spiraled out of control from there.
Obviously I’m the most hated person in the school district, parents with pitch forks at my door demanding to know how they are supposed to answer their children’s questions about why their elves abandoned them.
Not so. Via the magic chalkboard that they use to communicate with each other she was told, in no uncertain terms, that talking about him would alert Santa that he was a real magic elf now and he’d be forced to return to the North Pole with the rest of them. We are harboring a fugitive but as long as everybody plays it cool we should be able to avoid the naughty list.
If not than I’ll just keep on digging.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com
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internal pictures courtesy of author
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