Elf on the shelf

Image by Micala

I know there have already been many many blogs dedicated to this dear little fellow, and a lot of them have been hysterically funny. I will quickly explain for those of you in other parts of the world.  The elf is basically a little guy who watches the kids every day and at night goes back to Santa to report on who has been naughty and who has been nice.  The adults are supposed to move said elf every night so that it looks like he made his trip and came back and found somewhere new to sit.  Some pain in the ass parents even make him do naughty and creative things around the home at night...but I ask you, who has the time?  Anyway I was pondering him again this morning after reading todays "Rants from Mommyland" blog and wondering about the merits of bribing/blackmailing  ones kids into being good for the weeks running up to Christmas.

Let me first say, I do not have an elf, and I have no intention of buying one.  Not because i dont think he is cute, he is in fact a decent enough looking ornament, but mostly because there is no way in hell I am paying $30 for an elf to blackmail my kids.  I can do that on my own thank you very much.  You see since my kids were old enough to understand Christmas we have always "emailed" our lists to Santa.  Therefore Mommy has Santas direct email and does not hesitate to threaten to use it at this time of year to report any bad behavior.  Now I don't mean the usual sibling bickering and not wanting to go to bed behavior cause really I don't have that sort of time to waste emailing Santa, I mean the bigger stuff, any temper tantrums, excessive out of the normal bad behavior, and most recently to scare Diggle out of searching the cupboards to find the presents that I happened to mention I had got for them to give to DH for Christmas. 

You may wonder why I don't just show them these gifts, and there is a good reason.  You see they only get told on Christmas morning what they are giving Daddy, as Diggle has a complete inability to keep a secret.  Even if he knows it will get him into trouble, if you tell him, it's a secret we don't have to tell dad that you broke his favorite xyz, the very first thing Diggle will do on seeing his dad is to run up and whisper the secret to him.  I have had my own presents ruined this way by him before, hence the hiding of the presents. 

So yes on pondering the merits of blackmail and bribery on your your kids I realized I do it all the time, so nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with having to spend $30 to get it done.   There are much easier, cheaper ways my friends, and you don't have to keep remembering to move the fucking elf every night, or wondering when the monster dog will have decided to eat him and how your kids now require years of therapy cause the dog ate Santas helper!