This Mom Accidentally Murdered Her Kids' Elf On The Shelf & Any Parent Could Relate

Elf On The Shelf is a relatively new Christmas tradition, and it's one that many parents actively hate. In case you're not familiar with these precocious little elves, the idea is that Santa sends one of his elves to each kid or household at the beginning of December to keep an eye on the kids and make sure they deserve their spot on the nice list. Kids aren't allowed to touch the elves, or else they'll lose their magic and be unable to fly back to Santa every night to give their report.

Since the elves make nightly trips, they show up in a different spot in the house every day — and this is where the parental hatred comes in. That means parents have to either remember to find a new hiding spot every day or make up a damn good excuse about why the elf didn't move.

It's a hatred that runs deep for some parents, like Brittany Mease, who came up with a brilliant idea that was supposed to buy her two weeks of not moving the elf this year. She wrote in a post on Facebook that she told her kids, 9 year old Gray and 5 year old Ily, that their elf, Elfis, broke his leg tripping over the toys they left on the floor and would have to rest up for two weeks before he could fly back to Santa.

It was a brilliant plan, until 14 days came and went and Mease still forgot to move Elfis. Her kids started getting suspicious, so she grabbed the elf and tossed him in the first hiding spot she could think of before being able to find him a new place of honor the next day: the oven.

And that was a big mistake.

"I seriously forgot I put the freaking elf in the freaking oven," she wrote.

When Gray wanted leftover pasta a few days later, she fired up the oven without even thinking about it and poor little Elfis lost his head — literally.

"About 4 minutes later I started to smell something REALLY funky and that’s when all hell broke loose and I broke my son’s heart," she wrote. When she realized that the elf was still in the oven, she screamed and ran to pull it out.

"Gray came in the kitchen with excitement (literally the happiest I think I’ve seen him since he got out of the hospital) thinking our elf was back, but his world fell apart as we were using kitchen utensils to get our burnt and melting elf out of the damn oven," she wrote.

Gray had been in the hospital for several days due to rheumatic fever, Mease told Austin360, which is another reason she'd forgotten Elfis was in the oven. He was heartbroken when he saw that Elfis was dead, although his sister was a little less broken up. Ily, for one, was glad the elf was gone "because now he can’t tell on her.”

Luckily, Santa is all kinds of magic and Mease was able to fix the situation by giving him a call and telling him to come pick Elfis up for an emergency trip to the elf hospital. She replaced him with Elfis 2.0 and Christmas was saved.