Santa's Little Red Spy

It's that time of year again. The lights are hung and the tree is up. The mantle looks like an homage to the Three Wise Men (no not Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo and Johnny Walker Black) and Old St. Nick, and it is crunch time for shopping for christmas gifts and convincing our children that they need to "earn" their gifts.

It is the time of year when we encourage good behavior not just for normal reasons but because Santa is watching and we all know what happens to children who are bad when Santa is watching. You get the dreaded lump in your stocking. Although I have never known anyone who has actually received coal in their stocking just the thought of it is a great deterrent to poor attitudes around Christmas time.

How does Santa possibly watch every kid everywhere?

Why he sends out his army of spies to watch over the children of the world, that's how.

Today we put the Elf on the Shelf up and started the whole run around with Felton (the name we chose so cleverly for our felted elf). Last year Ryker was a little too young to understand the concept of the Elf on a Shelf and we couldn't get him too excited to search for it every morning. The whole process ended with a disinterested shrug and "hey there he is" quickly fading to apathy for the little red man sitting in random places around our home.

I truly believe it was his age that rendered him incapable of excitement regarding a little red suited doll that was supposedly watching his every move like a sentry sent from Santa himself.

"What do you mean he is reporting my actions in detail back to the big man with the gifts"

This year will be different and he will be excited (or else).

My question is, why do we as humans only respond to fear when it comes to behavior? Rather; why do parents mainly use fear as a deterrent for bad behavior? Is the presence of a known spy from Santa (Felton the Elf) supposed to goad a child into acting a certain way out of fear, or is the act of finding said spy a form of positive reward?

I know from experience that the threat of getting coal in your stocking works. It worked for me because I didn't want to be that one kid who got coal for Christmas.

"Oh what did you get in your stocking this year?"

 "A big friggin lump of coal"

Somehow that scenario doesn't sit well with a young person showing off his new toys to the kids at school.

I don't know how this Elf on a Shelf is going to work. I haven't seen any studies showing that the Elf has any positive effect on a child's behavior during the Christmas season (I could see the study title now "Elf on a Shelf has blank effect on blank children" presented by Amway Global ). Maybe I could get a government grant to do the study; they give money to scientists for anything these days.



Such a creepy looking little thing.



I guess we are about to find out. It might be a little hard to determine the effects due to the fact that my child is an angel. No joke, I have been blessed with a child that says please and thank you and waits his turn and all that jazz. How this happened I may never know. Maybe my wife and I are truly good parents or maybe my kid is some freak of toddler nature that actually has a conscience but I can't complain because my kid really is a good kid.

We will approach it like a game. Games are fun and kids learn from games so it's a win-win. The biggest challenge is going to be convincing Ryker that he can't touch Felton or it will ruin his magic. The kid touches everything (I swear I don't know where he gets that from).