Jennifer Woodbury

It was a mostly quiet December week around here, at least until The Elf Emergency of 2012 occurred.

On the day Buddy created this M&M message for the girls (by the way, you should know that Buddy steals all his ideas from other elves posting on Facebook and Pinterest), Lucy touched him. Anybody who is familiar with Elf on the Shelf lore knows that an elf loses its magic if touched. As soon as it happened, Ella burst into tears. I suggested writing a letter to Santa to explain the situation and she got right to work. Since Buddy would not be able to fly back to the North Pole that night to report to Santa, she made sure to include her own report on “Thursday’s attitude.” Note that the only person she gave a smiley face to was herself. In order to speed the process along, I also sent Santa an e-mail and he had some “Magic Elf Dust” (thank you Google) waiting for us in our mailbox the next day, so all was right in the world again.

On Saturday, Ella headed into New York with her good friend Will and his family to see the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City, so I promised Claire and Lucy we would do something fun at home. Baking cookies seemed to fit the bill. Ella even got home in time to decorate a few herself.

Matt strings lights on our second tree of the season.

Saturday was also the day we brought home Christmas tree #2. A couple of days after we chopped down our first tree, we somehow forgot to water it for 48 hours and it never really recovered from the neglect. It probably would have hobbled along until Christmas, but Matt determined that we should just cut our losses and get another one before things got any worse. So we undecorated tree #1 and hauled it outside, then headed down to a local nursery to pick out a replacement. When Ella got home from the Christmas Spectacular she immediately declared that she hated the new tree, and although my sentiments weren’t quite as strong, I have to admit that I really missed the original too.