This Mom Shared Her Hilarious Elf On The Shelf Hack Gone Wrong

The holiday season can be exhausting for parents, so nobody can blame you for wanting to skip out on a certain labor-intensive tradition. Organizing an Elf on the Shelf is notoriously a ton of work, but one mom’s understandable attempt to explain it away didn’t exactly go as intended, either.

In a TikTok, Chelsea Rice responded to another mom who complained that she had to get an Elf on the Shelf because her kids were asking why the elf visited their classmates and not them.

“Before I became a parent, I already knew I was never going to do Elf on the Shelf. Our household was never going to participate in the tradition,” she began. “I was always told by parents that it was a stupid tradition, that they regret ever starting it. It’s annoying. It takes forever.”

Check, check, and check.

Rice explained that skipping this tradition wasn’t a problem until her daughter started school and friends and classmates would share that they had one.

“I am not above lying if it gets me off the hook — sometimes,” Rice prefaced. “We’re listening and we’re not judging.”

“I panicked and I lied, and I told her that Santa sends elves to help households and classrooms where there’s naughty children, and there needs to be an extra set of eyes on them, and we don’t have one because she’s good,” she explained.

Now, that might sound like a totally believable explanation that maintains all the Christmas magic, a perfect response — but here’s where it goes south.

“From that moment on, every school year, she comes home and she tells me which students in her class she thinks is the reason they have an elf,” Rice said.

Well... at least Rice is now privy to all the elementary school gossip! Rice’s elf explanation still seems like a good one, in my opinion, but maybe only use it if you’re confident your kid will keep their naughty list suspects to themselves.

If this reasoning doesn’t quite work for your family, though, the comments section had plenty of ideas you could steal.

“I told mine that Santa asks each parent and I told Santa it wasn’t necessary,” one parent shared.

Oh... that’s a good idea!

“When I was little my mom told me elves only had to go to houses with naughty kids, OR houses that had more kids than parents and that’s why we didn’t need one,” another user added.

One parent even had a genius response for a kid that’s actually quite interested in being naughty.

“I told my kid the elf was a narc and since he’s magic he can see more than I can. She said keep him out the house 🙅‍♀️” she commented.

Whatever your excuse is, we support you doing what you have to do to avoid years of hard elf-related labor. Lie your hearts out. You’ve got this.