(WARNING: ELF ON THE SHELF SPOILERS) Here’s a bright idea: Don’t put plastic on hot light bulbs.
Daily Mail reports a British couple could have started a house fire because of where they decided to hide their child’s Elf on the Shelf. Max Oliver forgot to hide the elf, named Buddy, one morning and tasked her partner with finding a spot.
He decided to have it playfully hang underneath a lampshade … with the light on, perhaps thinking the 5-year-old kid would get a kick out of Buddy’s silhouette.
Oliver said she smelled burning 15 minutes later and thought her house was on fire. She and her boyfriend raced around the house to find the source of the stench and eventually realized the elf was melting. Lo and behold, the light bulb melted the elf’s face clean off.
“I instantly knew it was the elf that had melted but I didn’t know it’d be melted that badly,” said Oliver. “It wasn’t just melted — it was cremated — it was black. I was in hysterics, I thought it was absolutely hysterical.”
Buddy was hidden as to not scar her little one for life. “We hid it under the sink and wrote a note from the elf to say, ‘I had to help Santa in the toy shop – I’ll be back in a couple of days,'” Oliver recalled, adding they have since bought a replacement.
Luckily, the kid didn’t notice the new elf looked different than Buddy.
Oliver says the incident happened two years ago and she’s only posting about it now because her partner finally sees the humor in it.