3 #ElfontheShelf Lessons My Family Learnt this Holiday Season

So our family finally caught up with the #ElfontheShelf tradition this year. After much deliberation (which in “mommy brain time” means about ten seconds of uninterrupted free thinking), it was decided…So I went on the hunt for what would be our very own #Elfontheshelf, you know, the one that would fit into our slightly crazy, laundry-challenged, on-the-run family of four…

And on a damp Sunday morning after church, I found her in a corner of a Kohl’s store, the last girl #ElfontheShelf from the entire store inventory. It was ~~love~~ girl crush at first sight! Of course, it had to be a girl, because girls can do anything and Mommy’s way too much of a feminist to put the slightest dent into her lifelong theory on gender equality…Even when it comes to toys and the magic of the holidays…

Elf on the Shelf

So there I was, female Elf on the Shelf in hand, feminist pride in tow, toting our brand new tradition back home on a damp December morning. After an elaborate and quite spirited trick, which included the hubby hiding the car around the corner, ringing the bell and leaving the Elf package at the doorstep, Snowflake was officially adopted in the family. Which also meant as new parents, we implicitly signed on the invisible dotted line of the holiday magic, promising to perpetuate the tradition of the Elf going back to the North Pole to report on the kids’ behavior every night and coming back to crash in a new spot every morning.

As with any adoption of a new family member, there’s bound to be hiccups. Which may or may not include forgetting to move Snowflake a couple of nights and having to come up with semi-scientific justifications accompanied with straight parental faces. Or resorting to the unethical excuse of an inanimate object to get little people to behave in the interest of getting more inanimate objects to celebrate spending more money and having more stuff….Don’t judge us…

But (and there’s always a but), there are also always some lessons to be learnt as we tiptoe the fine line between wise parenting, cute holiday traditions and the need to just pee alone once in a great while. And for us, it came in the form of five interesting take-aways from adopting a girl elf in our slightly crazy, laundry-challenged household:

There’s Magic In Movement.

“Why does the Elf have to move all the time, Mommy?”

And why do these kids come up with questions that force you to think overtime? I mean, it’s enough to complete the year-end report, think about where I last put the keys, and devise a miraculous alternative to clean laundry. Now, to figure out why the Elf moves all the time, and has to go back hang out at the North Pole and come back to crash for breakfast, really, dude?

Fast-forward to a couple of cups of coffee, and some temporarily lifted brain fog…

“Because when she moves, she creates magic. She can fly to the North Pole and help Santa, and come back to a different place, and do it even better the next day.”

I had to give myself a virtual high-five for this one, especially considering this all happened before looking fully human early in the morning.

But the point is, really, there’s magic in movement, in doing something, anything, in not being at the same place all the time. Not living through the same experiences every year for 75 years and calling it a life…

As I drove to work that morning, I thought the Elf was pretty cool doing her own thing, switching it up all the time, and creating magic in the process. Maybe I could take a cue or two from her this year…

Which brings me to….

Change Is A Constant.

“But does the Elf move every day, Mommy? Don’t her wings get tired? And where are her wings anyways?”

See, that’s the problem with kids nowadays. We want them to be smart, inquisitive and all. And next thing you know, they’re asking you questions you can’t answer…I mean, I grew up in a household of four in West Africa, which also meant if you found an #ElfontheShelf and let it go to the North Pole to hang out, she wasn’t coming back no how…

“Change is good baby! She’s always moving and going places and seeing different things.”

I also wanted to add that we were running out of places to move Snowflake, and keep her looking all fresh and cool every morning. But that’s the thing with life, and parenting, and everything in else in between too, right?

You constantly have to update yourself, upgrade yourself, and stay in the mix, while still looking fresh and cool every morning…

Accountability is Cool.

Day 1: Oops, we forgot to move the #Elfontheshelf !

Like, really, we’re the parents here. With a gazillion electronic devices throughout the entire house, no one thought to set an alarm, a reminder, an automatic slap to let that poor Elf go hang out in the North Pole and move her the next morning…Really?

As much as we wanted to hold the kids accountable for behaving well so the Elf wouldn’t go back to the North Pole and tell on them (isn’t that tattle-telling?), we also had to be accountable. As in, being the adults and actually doing what we said we would…

We teach better what we need to learn, right? And sometimes as parents, in the shuffle of everything going on, it’s hard to keep ourselves accountable. Even to ourselves. I mean, I had vowed to keep myself accountable to make it to the gym and eat right. We all know what happened there…

As I was moving the Elf early this morning in between stubbing my toe on the Christmas tree and dropping coffee on my robe, I got to thinking about how a little inanimate object wrapped in a cute tradition can keep us in check…Teaching some things we forget along the way, and reminding us to pass it along…

And maybe that’s the true magic…

Plus the fact that I could swear this Elf be looking at me sideways every time I dip in the kids’ piggy bank for spare change…