Snicker & Doodle
Give me the heart of a child and the awesome courage to live it out. - Catherine Doherty
We’re all well acquainted with the elf on the shelf. The tidy red suit. The Pinterest setups. The pressure to perform December correctly. But a few years back, I stumbled into my own version.
I was wandering Value Village when I spotted them - twin elves, brand new, sealed in a box. They were, quite honestly, the creepiest little things I’d ever seen. Wide eyes. Slightly haunted smiles. Absolutely not cute by traditional standards. Which made them perfect. And so they became Snicker and Doodle.
For years, though, I’ll be honest - they were kind of a pain in the ass. December would roll around and it felt like one more thing to manage. One more invisible expectation. One more obligation that lived on my mental to-do list.
There was the morning the alarm went off, Scarlett started stirring, and I panicked - Holy fuck. The elves. I sprinted downstairs and basically hurled them into the Christmas tree like some kind of last-minute holiday crime scene. She never noticed. But I did.
It didn’t feel like magic back then. It felt like weight. Like responsibility. Like pressure to do what “good moms” do in December. And layered underneath all of that was a grief I didn’t yet fully understand: I was there…but I wasn’t really there.
Dissociation stole entire seasons from me. Stole spontaneous moments. Stole presence. I watched my daughter seem older than her years. I worried her imagination was slipping through the cracks too soon. I carried fears that childhood wonder was dissolving right in front of me - and I couldn’t quite reach it.
One Christmas, she even said to me, with startling clarity, “Mom… I know it’s not real. But you’re supposed to pretend. I’m a kid. You’re supposed to use your imagination.” That sentence broke something open in me. And I didn’t yet know how to step through it.
But this December is different. This December, Snicker and Doodle are pure fucking magic. Not because the setups are better. Not because I finally mastered elf choreography. But because I’m here now.
Alive. Present. In my body. In my life. In wonder with her.
Sunday night, November 30th, I was at an event at UBC when I got a text around 8 PM from Scarlett’s dad: “The elves come tonight.”
Scarlett just happened to be staying with him that night, so I drove home, rummaged through the garage, found the box, and delivered Snicker and Doodle to his place like some sort of sacred exchange.
And when they arrived this year…everything changed. Now I watch her pick them up and sing to them. Invite them into games. Try to make them blink. Tuck them into elaborate imaginary worlds.
This morning she whispered to them like they were alive. And I swear - I could sit for hours and do nothing but watch her. A wild, luminous, imaginative, perfectly-exactly-as-she-is nine-year-old.
What I wish I could bottle - what I wish I could transmit directly into the nervous system of every parent - is the miracle of coming out of dissociation and landing back in the room with your child. To suddenly feel the moments you once survived. To witness wonder instead of manage it. To play instead of perform. To delight instead of dissociate. There is nothing more sacred than that return.
Snicker and Doodle didn’t change. I did. And this December, the magic isn’t staged. It’s shared.