These days, is there any holiday tradition more treasured than the Elf on the Shelf prank? Not only does it add a bit of magic to the season, but it’s also actually pretty fun for grown-ups. Every night you get to think of some new way to surprise your kids. How fun!
If you’re looking for a little Elf on the Shelf inspiration, you might want to take a look at mom Jacqueline Garcia, who’s gone viral for the incredible pranks she shares on her TikTok page.
Speaking with CafeMom, Garcia says she doesn’t know exactly how she comes up with her pranks, but her ideas are always unique.
The mom, who goes by @jackie_o12 online, has racked up millions of views on her TikTok page — and it all started with a video she shared a couple of years ago.
In the video (which has more than 1.3 million views), her Elf on the Shelf, aka Alabaster, played a pretty sneaky trick on Garcia’s 5-year-old son, Alex, and snipped holes in the boy’s pjs while he was sleeping.
Alex was thoroughly confused when he woke up. 'I ripped them,' he told her in a follow-up video.
He then pointed to Alabaster and told his mom, “He got the scissors and ripped my whole clothes.”
The video even showed that sneaky Alabaster snipped a hole in the seat of her son’s underwear.
Sadly for Alex, this wasn't Alabaster's last trick. In another video, Alabaster drew a mustache on him while he was sleeping.
“Silly Elf is at it again!” the mom wrote in the video's caption.
It seems Alabaster does all of his best tricks while Alex is sleeping.
When else would you take a secret selfie with someone? Or get on a magic swing to surprise a 5-year-old boy when he woke up
(i.e., a paper mask attached to the doorframe). And when we say Alabaster, we hope it's very, very clear that it's Garcia doing all the hard work.
Inarguably, one of the mom's most popular videos is the “floor is lava” trick from December 16, 2020. In the video (which has a whopping 1.4 million views), not only did she hang Alabaster from the wall, but she also set up a maze of red Solo cups (i.e. the “lava”) around her son's bed — making it hard for him to escape when he woke up.
His reaction was priceless — he gasped when he saw that Alabaster was the culprit.
“Alabaster did that!” he exclaimed in a reaction video Garcia recorded. He even hilariously misread the sign that accompanied Alabaster. (It read, “The floor is lava.”)
”Alabaster put all the bottles …” he guessed.
Well, close enough.
Speaking with CafeMom, Garcia explained that when coming up with an idea, she keeps it pretty simple.
“I try to take little games like the floor is lava and blow them up and pretend the elf did it,” she says.
Of course big, elaborate, pranks are impressive, but Garcia is proof parents don’t need to go overboard to make some magic happen.
“I walk around my house after his bedtime and try to put something together from random things around the house,” she explains. “I’m a single mom so I can’t spend too much on everything so I use what I already have as much as I can.”
And she really made the most of what she has.
Another popular prank was the 'twins' joke.
Impressively, the mom managed to put her son into a pair of elf pajamas without waking him up — red pajamas, a homemade collar, and a Santa hat included.
“I turned red!” her son said the next morning, amazed at his new outfit. He looked just like Alabaster.
Imagine his shock when he turned around and discovered the culprit behind his new look.
“It was Alabaster!” he exclaimed.
“He couldn’t believe it,” the mom wrote in the video’s caption. “He basically stared at himself in the mirror forever.”
Garcia tells us that the idea came to her when she least expected it.
“I was shopping for PJ’s for him and came across the red onesie and it just popped into my head to make them twins,” she says.
The next year the mom upped the ante.
There was no way Alabaster was going to retire as the prank king. In fact, it seems Alabaster is still up to his old tricks. Take, for example, a video from December 2, 2021, where he moved Alex’s bed across the room — and then stretched out on his own bed.
"I used popsicle sticks from his homework to make the elf’s bed," the mom confesses to us, and "his little socks as a pillow and a scarf as the blanket."
The pranks don't stop when the family leaves the house.
Alabaster has been known to travel with Garcia and Alex when they go out, such as in a video from December 11, 2021, when he popped up at their table at a restaurant. Alex screamed when he saw Alabaster hiding behind a menu. "Look at how excited he gets," the mom wrote in the caption.
In the end, her son's smile is 100% the reason why she keeps pulling the Alabaster pranks.
"He loves the elf," Garcia tells CafeMom. "He wakes up everyday looking to see what he did that day."
And the mom hopes her videos make other people smile too.
"I just hope people think they’re fun and inspire them to do something fun for their kids," she says.
