Intro/Apology: I promised to blog every day in the month of November via the BlogHer NaBloPoMo. I started out strong. Gangbusters right out of the gate. And by November 8 it was all over. Work, PTO (when can we go back to calling it the PTA?), two business trips, one family trip and Thanksgiving all got in the way. And I ended up a failure.
But now it is December and I haven’t promised anything to anyone (not about this blog anyway). And I’m back. Turning over a new leaf to write more. Not because I put my name on a blogroll but because I really like it. And I missed it.
Like a lot of things, the holidays are so much more fun with the boys. Lately, I have been feeling a little wistful about them growing up (Insert “can you believe it is almost 2012? Where does the time go?” and all related comments here.) But as much as part of me wants to freeze time so that some one always yells “Yay! Mommy!” the moment I walk in the door, I have to admit that some things are more fun as the boys get older and more entertaining.
I didn’t have the type of childhood that gave me a lot of family traditions to hand down to my own kids. So my husband and I are often talking about what new traditions we can create and introduce to our kids–make our own and hopefully see them handed down, or at least fondly remembered.
One such recent addition is “The Elf on the Shelf.” Quick synopsis for the uninitiated: there is an elf that suddenly appears in the house around Christmas time. He is on a mission from Santa to keep an eye on the kids and report back. So each day he keeps watch and each night he goes back to the North Pole to check in with Santa. Then, the next day he returns to the house in a different spot.
The elf comes with a book that sets up the scene nicely and makes all the necessary rules (“no touching the elf or he loses his magic” is a particularly helpful one). And the first thing you have to do is name your elf.
Thanks to Middle D., our elf is named Chrispie Missmiss. (Pretty cute, right?) The boys really believe in Chrispie’s magic. Big F even wrote a list for Santa that he left by Chrispie to deliver last night. I could almost see the visions of sugar plums dancing in his head when he saw that our elf spy had moved and the list was gone.
Some people may say this little tradition is a pathetic way parents manipulate their kids into behaving well for 3 weeks out of the year. And to those people I say “You bet your sweet ass it is.”
But it is also really cool to see the boys believe in something with such joy and enthusiasm. I’m not sure it has really changed their behavior for the better. But it has made the season a little more special, a little less ordinary. Which is why, in my opinion, we have the holidays to begin with. We need the festivities to break up the monotony and keep us from losing our collective minds when it is dark at 5:00 each night, it has been 4 months since summer vacation, and it is too cold to go outside at recess.
My hope is that no matter where life takes him, when Middle D is a dad moving Chrispie from bookshelf to mantle and mantle to chandelier each December night, he will remember the special moments he shared with his brothers growing up in Colorado. That’s what the magic of the holidays is all about.
