PARENTHOOD IS ESSENTIALLY one giant game of ticking those ridiculous things you swore you’d never do pre-kids off your list, and laughing at the person you used to be.
Be it co-sleeping with your toddler just so you can get some sleep yourself, plonking an iPad in front of them in a restaurant, bribing them with a chocolate bar, or telling them the song on the ice cream man’s van means it’s out of ice cream, I could go on and on.
The point is, even the most well-intentioned parents find out that most of those mighty ideas get thrown out the window when you actually have children.
For me, the hill I was happy to die on was never, ever having the Elf on the Shelf in the house. While it’s not one of those long-held traditions in Ireland or something I grew up with, it’s fair to say it’s become very popular in recent years, with many young families around the country happily embracing the trend. You can even pick up an Elf in the middle aisle of the German retailers with your milk.
On the surface, you might think ‘What’s the problem? It’s just a cute little Christmas Elf sitting on your shelf, its harmless fun, what could go wrong?
Turns out, quite a bit.
For a start, the whole concept feels distinctly creepy.
This Elf is sent to your home to effectively spy on your child’s behaviour and report back to Santa every night until Christmas Eve. Plus, the child is also not allowed to touch the Elf, or the magic disappears from it.
The idea of ‘Santa is always watching’ is not new, and what parent hasn’t trotted out that line in the hopes of getting their child to stop doing whatever it is they are doing, when the chips are down? Still, having a pair of dark, soulless, beady elven eyes staring down at your children for the entirety of Advent feels like a surveillance step too far into the land of weird.
The real issue for me, though, is that I simply don’t have the energy left to remember to move the Elf every single night, in what is already the most mentally overstimulating month of the year for parents. And these days you can’t just move the Elf from one part of the room to another, no. I’m afraid the bar has now been raised to dizzying heights, where children brag to each other every morning in school about how outrageous their Elf is.
These days the Elf has got to be found hanging out of the rafters with Barbie on its arm or caught red handed trashing the bathroom with toilet paper or its head inside the breakfast cereal with mess all over the kitchen. Such, and I cannot stress this enough, fun, right?
“No,” I said to myself. “Never, will I ever get an Elf on the Shelf.”
Those pesky elves are always getting themselves into trouble. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Fast forward a few years, and I’m ashamed to admit that I have caved to pressure and the festive little git will be returning to our home on December first for its second reign of terror.
“Why don’t you just say no?” “Why didn’t you stick to your guns?” I hear you ask. The truth is, as much as I agree that I’ve heaped this elven misery upon my already stressed-to-the-gills self, I’m also acutely aware that my young children will only be in their magical era for such a short window of time, and I feel as though I’ve got to make the most of it.
That familiar pressure which most parents like me feel at this time of year is huge and ever-increasing.
Even the once-simple treat of going to visit Santa in the local shopping centre, or perhaps a trip into Dublin city, has gone stratospheric. Now it’s highly elaborate, multi-part ‘Santa Experiences’, with trains, winter wonderland workshops, hot chocolates with the elves, feeding the reindeers, and audiences with Mrs Claus, before you finally get your family photo (at an extra cost of course) and allotted minute of time with the man in red and come out with a generic gift that breaks before you even get back to the car.
The rational side of my brain knows it’s excessive and hugely expensive, but the other side tells me ‘shur lookit’, it’s Christmas, isn’t it all so lovely? You’ve got to keep making that magic happen for your children, even if it bankrupts you or leaves you feeling so overstretched and devoid of festive cheer, you’ve literally nothing left to give come December 25.
Like most parents, I’m already in the thick of the festive family mental load Olympics and have been for a few weeks.
Everything from school Christmas jumper days, finding costumes for the nativity play, drumming lines of Christmas songs into my kids, making sure I have the time off work for all the different Christmas plays and performances for both school and after school activities that are always in the middle of the working day, presents for teachers, class kris kindles, booking ice skating, those overpriced Santa experiences, Pantos and more.
And I haven’t even gotten to the rest, like trying to brave the shopping centres for gift buying or the dreaded festive grocery trips, where, with the tubs of roses and celebrations piled as high as the ceiling, alongside boxes of Tayto, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into the WW1 trenches. Which, if you’ve ever had the misfortune to be in Dunnes Cornelscourt around Christmas time, is fairly apt.
It’s the time when the usually calm supermarket aisles become decidedly edgy, and you get the sense that a ‘trolleys at dawn’ showdown could erupt at any minute over something as small as a sliced pan.
Adding the Elf on the Shelf into the mix feels like nothing short of sheer madness on my part and yet here I am, preparing to welcome the beady-eyed fecker into my home as I try to ignore my eye twitching, and enjoy my kids’ faces as they eat up the Elf’s ‘hilarious’ antics each and every morning.
Happy holidays, everyone.
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and wrangler of two small boys who is winging her way through motherhood, her forties and her eyeliner.
