My Xmas wish is to turn our Elf on the Shelf into a voodoo doll of my husband

"Because, let's face it, this is all his fault."

Seven years ago, my husband decided to jump on the Elf on the Shelf bandwagon and make Christmas extra special for our son - and I went along with it.

I’ve always loved Christmas and every year, I go the whole nine yards with decorations and gingerbread houses, Christmas carols and stockings bursting at the seams with presents.

And so, when my husband asked if we should do the EOTS when my son was about two, I said, “Sure, that sounds like fun.”

What a bloody mistake.

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"There's no going back"

For one, I didn’t think about the long-term commitment involved. Once you start, there’s no going back. 

Every year, our now three children ask when the EOTS will be arriving and eagerly await the big day. 

And each year, finding ways to be creative gets harder and harder. I find myself constantly feeling inadequate about my lack of originality on that front.

This year, we had an added layer of stress.

We’d moved house three weeks earlier, and the elf had gone AWOL. I mean literally vanished.

“It’s got to be in one of these damn boxes,” I said to my husband, sweat dripping off my forehead.

“I’ll check the shed,” he replied, and proceeded to pull EVERY box in the shed out and paw through its contents meticulously.

After hours of hunting, we concluded that our elf of seven years, Joey, had disappeared. 

Image: Melissa Noble

RELATED: ‘My sister is weirdly extra with Elf on the Shelf’

"My husband insisted on a solid excuse"

To solve the problem, I bought a new elf from Woolworths, but my husband said we needed a good story for the new elf’s arrival. Why would our usual elf, Joey, not return this year? 

And so, at 9.45pm on November 30, my husband drove like the wind to the local supermarket to purchase two additional elves, so that there would be three creepy new faces fresh from the North Pole in the morning – a trio of elves for our trio of children.

The problem was, he came home with the wrong elves. 

“WTF are those?” I asked, as he walked through the door holding two ridiculous-looking “jumbo” elves.

“They’re too big, they’ll be too hard to store, and they don’t match the one I’ve already bought.”

I could see my husband’s shoulders deflate. He was over it.

“Don’t worry, we’ll improvise,” I said comfortingly, even though I was imagining the elves had turned into voodoo dolls resembling him, and I was sticking pins in their butt cheeks.

I ended up writing a welcome letter from elf number 1 to say that because our family had expanded, more elf help was needed, so he’d landed, and his two brothers were on their way.

The younger kids seemed to buy it in the morning, but my nine-year-old son looked skeptical.

"Who started this madness anyway?"

That night, as I slammed down a gin with my husband on the couch, three sets of beady eyes judging me from the Christmas tree, my husband and I agreed that the elf tradition had been a mistake.

“Who the hell started this madness anyway?” he asked.

I look at him scathingly and want to say: "YOU."

In a more general, sense, though, it turns out we can thank Carol Aebersold and her daughter Chanda Bell, who self-published the book “The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition” along with a box with a small Scout Elf inside in 2005.

I don’t consider myself a grinch and I love all the other Christmas traditions, but this one has proved to be a lemon for us.

One of my biggest gripes is that it doesn’t make any bloody sense. How do you explain to a child why the elf is available from the local supermarket, if it’s meant to be coming from the North Pole?

Why do some kids have an elf and others don't (clever parents)?

Why didn’t mummy and daddy have an elf when they were little?

There are too many questions and not enough answers.

The problem is, now that we’ve started, there’s no going back.

Originally published as My Xmas wish is to turn our Elf on the Shelf into a voodoo doll of my husband