Day 8: Letters to Santa

I did not sleep well last night. I have a hard time falling asleep as it is, but when you throw in coughing fits and worrying about Clyde. It didn't go so well. The good news is that we took the kids to the doctor and no strep! Yay!!!

Why was I worrying about Clyde? Well, I wasn't sure he was going to stay in place. Just as I was about to doze off, I heard a noise. Arrrggghhh!!! It didn't seem loud enough to be Clyde. But I had to make sure. I didn't want the kids waking up and finding Clyde face down on the floor! So, I crawled out of bed and went to go see. The noise wasn't Clyde, but it was part of the set up. I had to add more tape. I also decided to add some tape to Clyde's bum. He was hanging on a nail and I really didn't think he'd stay by himself.

Good news! He stayed!

Our dear Clyde was up on the back of the kitchen cabinet facing the dining room. 

He left a note telling the kids to write a letter to Santa. "But they already wrote out their Christmas lists." Yes, but those weren't for Santa. They were for our Christmas tree. They have to make sure Santa gets their lists, too. :)

I've had these cute over-sized postcards from Macy's for a while. Like, two years! It was time to use them.

Clyde painted some clothespins. Now, they are all nicely striped like candy canes! It was the clothespins that caused the mysterious noise. They were too heavy for just a single piece of tape. Or even two pieces of tape. I had to use extra in a few different places. Clyde also used my cute Santa belt ribbon that I bought last year. He is a very resourceful elf. :)

As I lay awake last night, I thought Clyde looked too Jesus-like in his original position. Since I clipped the string holding his hands together, his arms stick out to the sides. I knew I needed to change his arm position somehow. And I wanted to link his position with the task in some way. I realized adding a pencil would solve both problems. I knew I had some Christmas themed pencils from Dollar Tree in my stash somewhere. So, I crawled out of bed, again. Went into the garage and dug out a pencil for Clyde and three more for the kids. 

By the way, mason jars are great for soooo many things. I bought a dozen two summers ago, because I was thinking of trying to make jam. That never happened. But I have used them in all sorts of way to decorate. I don't care if you hate jam. Go buy some mason jars. They are super useful! I'm going to store marshmallows in them when I set up a hot chocolate station. They won't get all hard. And will look cute, too!

After the arm-incident, I am definitely leaning towards hacking our elf. There is a great tutorial on how to do it on  Dirty Diaper Laundry. I'm not sure about the wire part, but I think I definitely need to do the velcro part.