A Visit from the Kindness Elves! Ideas for using the Kindness Elves

I left this blog post so late that I imagine everyone is pretty sick of elves on various shelves by this time of year, particularly those parents who are insane enough to adopt the elf tradition. If you’re anything like me, you’re running out of ideas of where to put that darn elf rapidly. We had a stroke of luck when the youngest daughter hid the elves for a couple of nights in her favourite pink back a pack which doesn’t leave her side. But by the time we’re nearing this close to Christmas we’re totally winging it on the old elf front. Every year I wish I was super organised like the mad USA moms with their Elf Calendars on Pinterest but a calendar just for an elf is a tad ridiculous when you can’t even manage to keep up a calendar for real life events!

We only have our elves arrive a couple of week’s before Christmas- they arrive when we put the Christmas tree up as I couldn’t keep going any longer than this, how on earth people manage to think of enough ideas to keep it up for the whole of December is beyond me!

If you’ve been reading the many anti-elf posts trending on Facebook you may agree with them that the elf is less magical these days and more commercial. Like most things, I’m a bit half way house on this one. I do think the elf can add a little bit of magic to your Christmas but also think there is a lot more to life than stressing where to hide the darn thing and whether you’ve managed to get a Pinterest worthy photo for your friends so they can admire your humour. (Aren’t there just a few too many elf tricks that seem to be more about the adults than the kids?!) there’s even elf shaming now for goodness sake! Check out this brilliant article on how ridiculous Christmas has become including a section on the Elf. I also hate the Americanised, commonlyphotographed elf. The scary, creepy one that frequents Pinterest- you know the one I’m talking about…it’s enough to terrorise your kids at night!

So, for all of the above reasons and because my children needed a bit of a kick up the backside on the kindness front, we decided to do The Kindness Elves this year. If you haven’t heard of these, they’re the Brain child of Anna from the Imagination Tree. They’re less commercial (at the moment) and the focus is less on the mad antics (although we’ve still dabbled a bit in this) and more on the elves encouraging the children to spread Christmas joy and acts of kindness. This sounded a perfect alternative to us!

Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, ’twas not all plain sailing and basking in kind deeds in this house……by Day Two, I was ready to chuck them in the bin. On the first morning, we had had arguments over who was going to read the elves note, which elf was whose, who could race down the stairs fast enough to find them-it was bedlam!!!!! Now, I do have children who can argue over ridiculous things like a cup of water and who has the most broccoli and who has the most bubbles in the bath but the kindness elves seemed to bring a whole new level to their bickering.

Day Five and things had calmed down a tad but I did notice that when the elves left ‘community acts of kindness’ my children couldn’t be quicker to complete them with a big smile on their face. They happily shopped for food for the Food Bank, made Malteser fudge for their neighbours and bought sandwiches for the homeless. However, when it came to acts of kindness for their siblings…..well, this was another matter entirely! They struggled to write down 10 things they loved about each other and failed to do the secret kind deed for the day for one of their siblings. On the day the elves told them “A kind word turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger”, they had called each other ‘liars’ and ‘stupid’ half an hour later!

But hopefully you’re still tempted to give The Kindness Elves a whirl and so, if you need inspiration here are some of the things our Elves got up to……

On Day Two they took a ‘ride in the shoe-shoe train’ and the children wrote thank you letters to their teachers.

On Day Three, the Elves swung from the Christmas tree and encouraged us to write Christmas cards to thank our postman and refuse collectors.

On Day Four, the elves cheekily played in the doll’s house and the children had to make others smile as much as they could.

Day Five and the elves had a snowball fight and asked the children ‘to make a new friend at school.’

On Day Six, the elves took an ‘Elfie’ and asked the children to fill a jar with ‘lovely things’ about one of their siblings (or parents). These were only partially finished by our useless lot but did include some comedy sentences such as Orla likes her sister because she ‘has a pink headband’ and Finlay loves his sister ‘when she plays what he says they have to play!’

We lost the elves for a couple of days around this point (parenting win) so we came back with….

Day Nine and the elves had a marshmallow snowball fight and encouraged the children to collect food for the foodbank.

Day Ten and the children have food to the homeless and the elves taped a cheeky statement.