Texas Mom Accidentally Bakes Elf On The Shelf While Making Leftover Pasta

A mom in Texas has gone viral after she accidentally baked her family's Elf on the Shelf — the eerie doll who reports to Santa on who's naughty and who's nice. Brittany Mease from Wylie took to Facebook with photos of the crime scene, showing a charred and melted "Elfis" with his head popped of. The mischievous pixie, whose shelf-life was five years, has since been replaced.

But for Mease, hiding Elfis is the bane of her existence.

"Ya'll know I can't stand doing Elf on the Shelf but I suck it up every year and do it to see those precious smiles on my beautiful children's faces," the military vet wrote on Facebook. So this year, the festive fellow debuted with a bandaged limb. In a note, he blamed it on the kids "for leaving their toys out, saying he tripped and broke his leg." For the next 14 days, Elfis was on doctor-ordered bed rest.

The kids waited patiently for two weeks. But when the elf didn't move, they started asking questions. So while they weren't looking, Mease swiped it off the counter and stashed it in the oven. But on December 18 when her ailing son requested leftover pasta, she forgot about Elfis' whereabouts until after she'd already turned on the oven.

"I preheated the oven and started cleaning the kitchen. About 4 minutes later I started to smell something REALLY funky and that's when all hell broke loose and I broke my son's heart," she wrote on Facebook. On the other hand, daughter Ily laughed it off. She was "glad the elf is gone because now he can't tell on her."

But Santa saved the day by "returning" a brand new healed Elfis to Mease and her kids. Gray even wrote him a precautionary note instructing the doll to return back to the same safe location every night. It reads: "Come back here Elfis so you don't die again."

Much to this mother's dismay, the Elf on the Shelf will live to see another day. For more kooky Christmastime rituals, here are 15 American holiday traditions we don't realize are weird.