It was the nightmare before Christmas.
A UK woman is living a holiday lie after being forced to devise an elaborate cover story — involving dinosaurs and mystical amputees — about why her son’s “Elf on a Shelf” lost his leg. A video detailing her epic Yuletide yarn is currently going viral online.
“The elf is going to take over my life,” Lauren Weir, 30, captioned the uproarious clip.
She explained, “My son’s elf on the shelf lost a leg. I don’t know where it’s gone. It’s vanished. So I sewed him up. Made up a convincing backstory.”
Photos show the lengths the determined mother went to in an attempt to save Christmas, which involved a staged T-Rex attack and even a LEGO wheelchair, Kennedy News reported.
The fiasco began in December after the Hertfordshire mother of two bought her four-year-old son Tommy Flynn an Elf on a Shelf. Children are told that the toy, which is based on a 2004 book by Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell, is surveilling them at all hours to see if they’ve been naughty or nice.
The tyke was so enamored with Saint Nick’s narc that he brought it to school for show and tell.
All was going swimmingly until Weir packed up to leave and realized her boy’s beloved toy was one limb short. “I had given it to my smallest son to play with at my neighbor’s and then I was getting all my bits together to leave, I picked the elf up and the leg just wasn’t there anymore,” explained the distraught mom. “It’s not at my neighbors, it’s not in the car, it’s just vanished off the face of the earth.”
She added, “The only explanation I can think of is that when I put it into my changing bag as I was leaving school it ripped off somehow.”
Either way, the missing appendage sent Weir into a panic. “I was like, ‘Oh my god what am I going to do,” fretted the mother. “I didn’t have time to go out and get another one.”
Weir realized she was stuck between a jingle bell rock and a hard place. “If I didn’t fix it I knew he’d be devastated but I knew if it lost a leg he’d just accept it,” explained Weir, who ultimately decided to concoct an intricate fib to keep the Christmas mythos alive.
So the resourceful parent sewed up the hole in the toy’s leg and then staged an attack using Tommy’s toy dinosaur figurines. Accompanying pics show a T-Rex and another carnivorous reptile playing tug-of-war with the legless shelf elf like a perverse nativity scene.
Thankfully, Weir’s Santa con paid dividends. “He was so excited when he came downstairs the next day, he was like ‘where’s his leg?'” described the relieved guardian. “I was like ‘the dinosaurs must have eaten it!'”
She added, “He thinks it’s great that his elf survived this dinosaur attack.”
At one point, Tommy even tag-teamed the prehistoric Grinches with an “Iron Man” toy as revenge for dismembering Kris Kringle’s minion, Weir explained.
Of course, that was only part one of the deception as Tommy was “concerned about how the elf was going to get around only having one leg,” according to Weir.
So the Santa-Con artist “made a call” to Father Christmas in front of him and “requested that he send some crutches or a wheelchair to the elf.”
Low and behold, the next day when Tommy came down the stairs, his elf was sitting in a LEGO wheelchair like Professor X-mas, Kennedy reported.
“He thinks Santa’s really good at making Lego wheelchairs,” explained the cheeky Xmas swindler, adding that putting the shelved elf on wheels was no mean feat.
“The wheelchair took ages because I was trying to be quiet sifting through the Lego because it’s so noisy,” she said. Weir explained that trying to compile the red and green-colored “Christmas” bricks was also a huge pain in the patootie.
All told, sewing the leg and erecting the miniature mobility aid took a whopping two hours in total.
While Elf on a Shelf may have taken over her life, Weir believes that maintaining its cover was worth it. She explained that the knick-knack has brought her kids joy, since her Christmas-saving scheme — despite it having only one leg.
“I really wanted to keep the magic alive because the fact that he believes so whole-heartedly is just so heartwarming it makes me want to cry,” she explained. “As soon as he opens his eyes in the morning he’s like ‘Let’s go and see what the elf’s done.”
Some of her more creative Elf on a Shelf stunts since then have included having it drive a delivery truck of chocolate coins and fish in the pet fish tank with a shoelace rod.
In the future, Weir hopes to give the fun-sized Christmas snitch to his brother as well.
“My youngest son will have one next year as well when he’s a bit older — hopefully that one will keep both legs,” she said.