Anne loves puns more than anything else in the world. She is so easily amused, she’ll spend hours trying to craft the best pun, and always has something ready for any situation. She’s like the Wayne Gretzky of dad jokes, too.

Being as easily amused as I am*, I’m a great audience for all of her humor, which is delightful for both of us.

She’s also incredibly creative, and loves to make cute, clever things.

Yesterday, she came home from the craft store with a bag of, well, elf parts.

“What are you going to do with a bag of elf parts?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“You know how people take selfies?” She said.

“Yes…”

“Well, if an elf did that, it would be called an elfie, so I’m going to make dioramas of an elf and his friends having a night out, and I’m going to use my cell phone to take pictures of them that he took himself.”

“That’s brilliant,” I said.

“Guess how much this bag of stuff cost?” She said.

I looked at the bag. It was fairly full of elf parts, and it looked like there were some googly eyes, reindeer parts, and a few other Christmas items inside.

“Um … thirty dollars?”

“You’d think so, right? And if it was thirty dollars, you’d think ‘wow, that’s totally worth thirty dollars.'”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, yes.”

“Well, it was actually …” she paused dramatically, “eight dollars and eleven cents.”

“BAM!” I said. “You you got thirty dollars of elf in an eight dollar bag, is what you’re saying.”

“Exactly.”

She took the elf parts out of the bag, and got to work assembling them. A little while later, she brought an assembled elf into my office to show it to me.

“So I can put his little hand out like this,” she demonstrated, “and hold the camera out like this,” she held it up, “and it totally looks like he’s taking an elfie.”

“That’s rad,” I said.

I didn’t see her for close to four hours while she built more figures, set up construction paper for a backdrop, and took about a dozen elfies.

When she was all finished, she put them on her blog in a gallery that I think you will find as delightful as I did.

You can see the whole set at her blog. Happy Christmas Eve!

*(again, kids, being easily amused is the best because when you are easily amused, it is easy to amuse you.)

I really love this shirt that I helped design, which is at shirt.woot:

I’ve wanted to do something like this, which combines the Great Wave of Kanagawa with gaming, and I was super excited when the artists at shirt.woot helped take the idea I had in my head and make it a thing you can wear.

BUT!

It’s currently #16 in The Reckoning at shirt.woot. This means that it’s likely going to go live on a farm upstate where it can play in a field with other T-shirts.

UNLESS!

Unless it sells more before Monday, and climbs back up the pack to a single digit ranking, where it’ll be safe for at least a few weeks.

THEREFORE!

If you’re interested in having this design on a t-shirt, a hoodie, or a tote bag, this may be your last chance to get it, before it is swept away by a great wave of reckoning.

THANK YOU THAT IS ALL.

I’m not sure why I thought I needed to do bold slug lines in this post. It probably has something to do with the coffee in my otherwise empty stomach.