Our Life with Ella the Christmas Elf
What we learned from her.
For ten years an elf showed up the first of December at our house. She was ten inches tall, dressed in red, with a pointed Santa hat. We assumed she was a girl because she was wearing earrings, which I realize we shouldn’t have done. We named her Ella.
She didn’t move during the day, but at night, when everyone was asleep, she would wander around and get into things. Sometimes she made messes. Sometimes she left messages, sometimes gifts. Once she baked cookies and was found the next morning covered in flour and sugar.
Every morning she was hiding in a new place and had to be found.
All this started when our little girl, Skye, was nine years old. The tradition continued until she was 17. Our daughter kept pretending that the elf was real, and she pretended so well that we didn’t know if she was pretending, and we’re still not sure. At the end of every November Skye began to urgently watch for Ella’s arrival. My husband Raven and I would be thinking aloud to each other that maybe this was the year that Ella figured Skye was too grown for elfdom, and Ella would move on to another family. Skye would wail so pitifully that, year after year, Ella showed up.
When the sun rose on the first of December, an elf was in the house.
Our farmhouse is built in an old vernacular style where the kitchen is separate from the main structure. Ella kept herself to the kitchen. Morning after morning Skye would leap out of bed and run across the breezeway to the kitchen for her daily game of hide-and-go-seek.
For 25 nights the elf had lots of time to get into trouble and lots of time to think of new places to hide. If daylight struck she’d fall asleep where she was playing.
Sometimes she scattered dishes all over the place.
Sometimes she lined the shoes up.
The rule is, You can’t touch an elf. Touching a Christmas elf could make them disappear permanently. So if you wake up and shoes are all over the floor, and your elf is asleep with her eyes open in one of the boots, you can’t touch her. You have to look for another pair of shoes to wear.
Photos of life with Ella often didn’t turn out well, because they were usually taken in low-light conditions, with a lot of hollering from Skye to be careful, to not touch her. What I want to tell you is that Ella could get very creative with her play. Once she got into a bird’s nest, stuck feathers all around, and kept some hen eggs warm.
From Ella I learned a good deal about creativity. If you are made to come up with new ideas, you get good at producing them. You have a deadline. Something has to be figured out. You do it.
And of course we all know a second maxim, about having fun. Even though you grow up, you shouldn’t stop having fun.
The one, as well, about keeping magic alive.
Then there’s the one from Gay Hendricks, from The Big Leap, to give yourself permission to make your life go well all the time. That’s the one I’m learning.
As the eldest of four children, I believed in the magic of Santa for so long because I wanted to believe. My mother would never let the older children even utter the phrase, "Santa isn't real." She'd look us straight in the eye and proclaim: "I believe in the magic of Christmas." The word "magic" was underscored in a way that told us we better believe in the magic too for the good of household. Mocking the magic would also trample on the worldview of my mother, a pre-school music teacher who held her Episcopal faith and magical awe as equal foundations to her delight in this life.
What happens when we build these rituals as parents and create that magic, like your dear Skye's belief in the magic of the Elf? Well, I've found in my own little household of three--just me and two daughters, 24 and 18--that the "children" start to hold fast to those traditions and later protest if you try to alter them in the least! We have a 900-sq foot rental, and my artsy neighbor has a wonderful retro silver aluminum Xmas tree, which she stores in the attic and brings out each year. It's almost like a sculpture with lights, and I imagined myself hauling it out every year, my own piece of Advent art.
The end of this tale is as predictable as the little Elf's reappearance each year! "We CANNOT get a fake tree!" my teenager said. This is the same one who just got a tattoo and who is so eager to live on her own--I can almost smell her need to get away from me like a sixth sense in our small abode. Struggling with a math class this semester, she begged me to get the Christmas tree this week to try and distract her mind from the calculus which eluded her. So we went to a corner lot by a gas station--it's not fancy at all, but it's where we go--and we picked out a tree. "Can I get one for my room?" she asked. "A real one?" I asked, knowing the answer. She nodded.
I paused. Why the hell wouldn't we have two Christmas trees in a three-room duplex? I couldn't think of a reason except my own need for order, so I nodded too. The kind, burly guy at the x-mas tree corner lot put the 5-foot and 4-foot tree on top of my car. "Merry Christmas, y'all!" he said, whipping out his knife to cut the cordage binding the tree to the car. As soon as we pulled into our drive, the high school boy who's fallen for my daughter pulled his car next to ours at home.
My daughter had made us stop at the Dollar General to get eggnog (this was a first for me--the Dollar General for their eggnog). "We CAN'T decorate the tree without eggnog!!" So I poured the eggnog into my mom's china teacups, and the new boy sat by my daughter as she pulled out the ornaments from a cardboard box: "This one was my mom's grandparents, and this one I made in preschool, and this one was from my mom's parents' home." He smiled at her, grateful for proximity, like every word was a gift.
Later that night, I overheard them while I was washing out the eggnog cups and dinner dishes. "At night, my mom leaves on the Christmas tree lights, so when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it feels like magic."
So yes, just like Skye and my mother, we believe in the magic of Christmas and reclaim those seeds of mystery and awe year after year. Merry Christmas y'all--and thank for Janisse for sharing this tale--and allowing me to procrastinate grading for another hour! Back to it!
Elves don't visit our house but I 100% approve of Ella swimming in a pool of swamp chestnut oaks while sipping on some milk, the best oak in the south! Good choice, Ella!