Why I Hate the Elf on a Shelf :)

Have you seen him? I wanna wipe that smug little smile off his face. The little bastard.

Seriously though. Don't misunderstand. I think the IDEA of the Elf on a Shelf is a fun one. The intent is that he/she is supposed to get into mischief during the night, and the kids look for him in the morning and get a kick out of whatever he/she has done. It is a cute way to help the kids count down the days until Christmas. And it isn't really that hard, especially now that there is Pinterest (which didn't exist when we got our elf way back in 2009), and there are pins of hundreds of things you can do with the elf. Fun right? If you want to read the backstory on the elf, go to www.elfontheshelf.com/content/about-us .

However....

As typically happens though, not everyone out there can be satisfied with just mischief. The people who gave my daughter the elf when we lived in Alabama were THOSE kind of people. I think maybe the mom in that family didn't want to really be bothered with setting up a scene, so their elf brought a GIFT to her kids every morning. A GIFT. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. FOR. 25. DAYS. For kids who didn't even believe in Santa anyway. So obviously, our elf had to bring a gift too or my daughter would feel like hers was defective. She didn't know that he was supposed to only do silly things. She didn't have any other friends who had one. Only the MOST materialistic of all her friends. The ones who wore the best clothes and went to be best private school. The ones who got everything they ever asked for. Then, even after we weren't in Alabama anymore, she would still expect the gifts...except as soon as we left AL, I just stopped.

I try hard to make my kids understand that Christmas isn't all about the gifts. I want them to focus on the giving aspect, rather than the receiving, but our culture doesn't make that easy. I know that isn't really the elf's fault. :) But I tell you that the little knowing smile on his face brings back the stressed out feelings of that first Christmas in AL every time I open the Christmas boxes. Of me trying to make it through my first Christmas as a teacher and freaking out trying to find small gifts to leave out every morning...and not forget to do it. I'm not even sure why we still have the elf. I tried to throw him away a couple of years ago, but my daughter freaked out. He's still in the Christmas box; I just saw him. Maybe that is supposed to be a reminder to me to emphasize the TRUE meaning of Christmas. Yeah. That must be it. Not that I'm too lazy to hide him at the  bottom of the trashcan. :)