A right jolly old el(ves)

I think we may have gotten in on the early side on the elf craze, because for some reason we had elves causing mayhem at our house around Christmastime before their mass proliferation and takeover of the Christmas land. And now, the backlash has begun (see this hilarious article . I see (and agree with) many of her points.) That said, it's hard to understate how much these kids love their elves. They really do create a kind of Christmas magic for children that only comes with overturned furniture and Christmas trees rolled with TP.

Jacob has always been our most difficult child for the elves to please. Certain elf antics that I personally loved, like the time they joined in singing along with our Christmas carolers, left him seriously unimpressed. But this year Jacob is 9 and has joined Team Elf, if you know what I mean, and the girls tend to be delighted with whatever the elves decide to do.

Like decorating the palm tree? Jacob would have revolted when he was younger if that's all they managed to come up with. But the girls were tickled.



Now I start to worry when they start messing with the lights. Seriously -- we all know how temperamental these things can be. Thankfully they just needed a little untangling and we didn't wake up to a string of white lights that was only half illuminated.






Ah, the old post-it-note-all-over-the-house trick. They must have heard about this one from the elves back at the Pole. Why is it that whenever I need a post-it note, I can't find even one, but we get a bunch of Christmas elves running around the house and they manage to find a whole pad of them to stick all over the place?








Now we like to hold onto boxes in December because we tend to need them for mailing packages and wrapping presents. But David and I had just been talking about how we were probably good with the boxes and really needed to set a lot of them out to recycling, or we'd be buried in boxes after Christmas. And then the elves really drove home that point for us.





One night I could have sworn I heard this kind of knock-knock-knocking sound. When we woke up the next morning, we saw that the elves had been having an air hockey tournament in the basement.




Bix had on his game face.



They were cheered on by some Community Helper puppets.



I woke up early this morning and decided that I'd knock out the final treat for the 12 treats of Christmas project. Yeah -- maybe not. I couldn't even make my (desperately needed) coffee, because the elves had taken my kitchen twine and rigged up some kind of booby trap in my kitchen.





There's always a ringleader -- this time, it was Libby.



One thing about Christmas is that there is a lot of extra "stuff" around, and the elves seem use it to find trouble. One morning we woke up to find Bix's head stuck in the Nutcracker:



Libby (or is that Colline? I seriously cannot tell those two apart, and it drives my kids BONKERS) was trying to work the lever to free Bix (or was she holding the lever up to keep him stuck? You decide.) While Colline/Libby had gotten out the toolbox to look for something that would assist in Bix's liberation. It looks like they found the WD-40 -- even halfway smart elves know that WD-40 and duct tape can fix almost any problem.



Just a few more days with these elves! As is the case every year, my kids will be very sad about that, but David and I will be happy not to have "undo elf mischief" on our daily to-do list. But we'll miss watching the kids react to the daily antics of their tiny red and green friends!