MANDY FLYNN: Shelving the elf

Our elf has left the building.

There has been conversation circulating at work about Elf on the Shelf, the little fellow who visits the homes of young children between Thanksgiving and Christmas and reports back to Santa Claus on the status of their nautiness and niceness. I can’t really add much to the coversation, seeing as we had an Elf on the Shelf come to visit our house for only one month and it was years ago, about the time the little red felt narc was first born.

I hate to admit it, but he was a pretty lazy elf. He spent the better part of the month in our freezer chilling out with the ice cubes, except for the time he decided to sit in the Christmas tree.

The dog got a hold of him and almost ate his face off. I rescued him, though, and he went back to the North Pole for what I can only assume was plastic surgery and a pretty bad report on how we held him captive in the refrigerator.

Thankfully, Santa didn’t listen to him and still came that year.

I have friends whose children have woken up to find their elf dressed as a beauty queen riding in a Barbie car as if in a parade, playing cards with GI Joe, zip-lining through the dining room, and sitting at their mother’s sewing machine making outfits for the children. Others have had mischievous elves who tore up pillows and had a snowball fight with pillow stuffing, got into the cabinets and left flour and sugar all over the kitchen, and one that even stole their grandfather’s false teeth and used them as a chair.

That, I will admit, was pretty darn funny.

I am not totally against the elf as some people are, and am pretty certain if our children were younger he would be visiting us this Christmas season, too. It would be even more wonderful if he were an obsessive-compulsive neat freak elf who, in the dark of night, did laundry, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, washed the dogs, shopped for groceries, and touched up my roots as I slept. You’re never supposed to touch the elf or he will lose his magic and not come back, but I wonder if the same thing applies to if he touches you, because it would be extra awesome if he would rub my feet.

I thought long and hard about it — it was a slow day — and wondered if Elf on the Shelf had been around when we were young, what sorts of things would he have done. Would he have survived a housefull of six children, or would we have had six elves? On that note, considering the fact that all the elves dress alike and wear the same color and identical hats, six elves could quite possibly be considered a gang, which wouldn’t be good, not good at all.

It doesn’t matter, really, because we didn’t need elves spying on us when we were little to make sure we behaved. Instead of Elf on the Shelf we had Flyswatter On Top of the Refrigerator and Switch In The Yard. And let’s not forget Stink Eye Over The Top of the Glasses. No elf could ever match that. Besides, the thought of some creature watching me would have creeped me out beyond repair, like the time my siblings told me they saw the biggest elf of them all — Santa — peeking in my bedroom window to see if I was being good.

I cried for days, not because it scared me so much as I was worried he had seen me about to cut my sister’s Miss Beasley’s doll hair. Miss Beasley was off limits. Nobody touched Miss Beasley. Especially with scissors.

All in all, I don’t think Elf on the Shelf is such a bad guy, but I am glad he doesn’t come visit us any longer. Unless, of course, Santa sent us the overachieving, please-let-me-cook-all-your-meals and iron-your-clothes-for-you Elf. That I could manage. Unless he got lazy. Then we’d have to make other arrangements.

I hope he doesn’t mind sitting next to the frozen pizza.

Email columnist Mandy Flynn at [email protected].