Elf Hunting

Today we celebrated Mikey's birthday with a lot of football, sausages, and picking on me for not updating my blog. I really have no excuse for not updating...it's not like I've been working 600 hours a day, only to come home, starving, to a steak-less house, forced to go to bed hungry. Too bad I don't work somewhere that serves great wine and good food, or at least somewhere next to a Mighty Taco, so I could get food on my way home from work.

Anyway, I've been so physically and emotionally exhausted (I started crying when I came home and there were no steaks to eat on Friday night, and then at work on Saturday when I found out I'd have to stay later than I thought I would and make creme brulee...like that's part of my job or something!). My fish, Opie, is even mad at me because I've been neglecting him. I try to talk to him when I come home from work, but he's usually asleep, and I've forgotten to feed him once or twice in the past week...well, fish have feelings too, and today he was so mad that he pretended to be dead. When I woke up he was floating upside down in his bowl, but when I went to pick it up to take him to the toilet for a burial at sea, he started swimming around. I spend a few minutes with him, explaining why I haven't been around, and I think he understands. Hopefully he'll behave better from now on.

Today I finally had the time to write a blog, but no energy to come up with a topic. Mike had a few suggestions, thankfully. One of them was Elves. When we were little and would have big family dinners every weekend (because we don't now...), they would always end with the kids running around the circle of the house (well, running as fast as we could through the pantry, the den, and the entry way, and then walking really fast through the kitchen, like the grown ups wouldn't know we were running in the house...). The men would be sitting at the table and the women would be doing the dishes. One way to get us to sit down and be still and quiet was to tell us to go look for elves. Unfortunately, this only worked between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and one of them had to be sacrificed and banished to the second floor.

Somehow, the story started that after Thanksgiving Santa got too busy to watch over all the kids in the world himself, so he'd send out his elves to check on us. If you were really still and quiet and sat in a dark room, you could see them. So all the kids (about 10 of us, but it seemed like a lot more) would run into the den and fight for a spot in front of the window. With all the lights turned off and the room totally silent (except for the noise of the adults in the next room), it was a little scary. And the excitement of knowing that at any moment an elf could fly past the window was amazing. I know now that it was really one of my uncles upstairs in one of the bedrooms, hanging an elf doll down and letting it swing by the downstairs windows. But at the time, it was a real elf, and it was really awesome.

They say ignorance is bliss, and I have to agree in this case. I'll never forget the day I found the elf doll in the cabinet in the laundry room. I was old enough to not believe in Santa anymore, and I knew deep down that the elves weren't real, but having the proof in my hands was still upsetting...the end of a childhood era, in a way.

We tried for a while to carry on the tradition, but we went a little overboard, and somehow a naked barbie doll ended up on the end of the string, hanging in the downstairs window for my little cousins to see. Not exactly the kind of elves we want them to think Santa has...maybe now that the next generation is coming we can start again, this time with a real elf doll, and not naked barbies.