In Case You Care

So you may be wondering, "What happened with that crazy elf box?" Well, we were doing great until Charlie threw Bobby's Nintendo DS across the kitchen floor and smashed it to bits.

Bobby was inconsolable. He loves that thing. Santa brought it to him last year and he plays with it all the time. That night he wrote a letter to Mike the Elf asking him to please fix it and left it with the broken DS on top of the elf box.

If it had been Bobby's fault at all I would have said "Tough crap. Start saving your money". But it wasn't and he didn't even ask for a new one. I told The Husband that we should go buy a new one and just let him think the elf magically fixed it. He said no way. He left a note from Mike saying that Mike was just a candy elf. He didn't know how to fix toys. Bobby was disappointed but every night he continued to leave it on the box.

I felt so bad for him that I finally wore The Husband down. But now it was the 23rd and I couldn't find a black DS (to match the one he had) anywhere. I could only find silver. So, that night "Mike" left a note saying that he would take the DS to the North Pole and let a toy elf look at it. Bobby was thrilled.

Christmas morning, next to the plate of eaten cookies was Bobby's broken DS and a note from Mike. It said, that the toy elf, Hannibal* couldn't fix the DS but had a surprise for him behind the box. Behind that damned elf box was the new silver DS. Bobby was beside himself - it was probably the best part of Christmas.

*The most disturbing part of this story is that my husband seems to have the whole elf world clearly laid out in his mind. I asked him why the toy elf's name was Hannibal and not, say, Paul. He replied way too seriously that candy elves had regular names like Mike and Paul but toy elves had names from the classical era, like Caesar or Octavius.