The Elf is watching!

Of my four grand children two are solid believers in Santa, one is too young to really have an opinion one way or another and the oldest is developing doubts but still hanging in there. By next year, she will have grown out of it.

There are definite benefits to having children who still believe.

For example take the Elf on the Shelf strategy which my son and daughter-in-law have adopted.

They have a little model of the elf you see here and every day my daughter-in-law changes its location.

Their two boys firmly believe they're being watched and that he reports to Santa every night.

Yesterday, the older of the two boys-age 4-was upset about something, tossed a toy car across the room and slapped my leg. His frustration was then compounded by the fact that he realized the elf was watching so he thought Santa was going to get a bad report.

I calmed him down and explained that the elf always took into consideration the fact that if kids did something wrong but they were sorry for it and made up for it in some way, then it would be OK.

That seemed to do the trick.

The good news is by the time he no longer believes in the elf-on-the-shelf, his "internal" elf will have taken over.

Merry Christmas--and be good. You-know-who is watching!