The holidays are draining: shopping, wrapping, baking…they can all leave you worn out! But parents who are a slave to Elf on the Shelf know that there’s nothing more energy zapping than thinking of a creative way to hide your elf every day! 

After a few days of forgetting to move their North Pole friend, we had one listener’s son tell her that they needed a new elf because there’s was “broken.”  Everyone knows a good spy can’t see everything by sitting in the same place, day after day after day! Other parents tell us that they’ve actually turned around and gone back home to move the elf once they realized that they’d forgotten to move him before going to the work or gym.  Some have called their significant other in a panic to draft them into helping at the last minute.

Elf on the Shelf launched as a children’s book in 2005 and has exploded in popularity.  The basic concept of the story is that Santa can’t possibly keep an eye on every little boy and girl to see if they’ve been naughty or nice, so they send pixie scout elves to keep an eye on kids in their own homes from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. There are two essentials to making sure your scout elf has enough magic to fly back to Santa each night to report how the kids are performing: you need to name him and the kids need to love him. The elf loses it’s magic and ability to get to Santa if a child touches it.

That flying back to the North Pole each night is where parents creativity comes in.  The idea is to make sure it looks like the elf has left and returned to the home, so you put him in a new creative situation each day. It stresses parents out, but if convincing the kids someone’s spying on them to report back to Santa scares them into behaving, it’s worth it…right?

Meh. Maybe, but there’s a new Christmas fad growing in popularity that does the exact same thing without nearly as much work! The new fad is called “Santa Cam.”  It’s essentially an ornament (often black) designed to look like a camera lens recording what’s going on in your home to transmit back to Santa. Once it’s on the tree, it’s always watching! Yup…that’s it. You hang it on the tree, read your kids a note from Santa that says something to the tune of he knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re away, ya da ya da because he can see you through is Santa Cam, so be good for goodness sakes!

And that’s it. Literally that’s all you do is hang up the ornament and it instills the same sense of paranoia in your child.

Bummed that you found out about it so late in the season.  There’s always trading in your elf for the “Santa Cam” next year!  There’s a ton of Etsy sellers who make them, but if you want to get one for yourself, give me a shout! I make them too!

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