Elf on the Shelf ideas for Dubai: the elf who moved too

30 November, 9.40pm

The box nobody had opened since August

The last box from the shipment had lived in the storeroom for three months, because it said Christmas on the side and Christmas had seemed a very long way off in August, when it was forty-four degrees and Alfie would not leave the apartment. Claire opened it on the last night of November with a cup of tea and a pair of scissors. Inside were the stockings, the tree skirt her mother had sewn, a string of lights that probably needed new batteries, and the elf, folded in half and smelling slightly of the cupboard under the stairs.

She sat on the floor and thought about it. Last year the elf had been a nuisance she kept forgetting at eleven at night. This year he could be useful. If Alfie felt that everything had been taken away and replaced, the elf could be the one thing that had been taken away and come back. And he could arrive the way they had: tired, confused, and slightly too warm.

1 December, 6.15am

Jet-lagged, with a boarding pass

Alfie found him at the kitchen counter, beside a bowl of instant noodles with a fork standing up in it. There was a card propped against the bowl. “Hi, my name is Errol. Sorry about the mess. My body clock still thinks it is Manchester.” Tucked under one arm was a boarding pass Claire had made at midnight from an old luggage label: Manchester to Dubai, seat 1A, “one elf, no luggage”.

Alfie read the card twice and then asked, with real concern, whether Errol had been sick on the plane, because Alfie had been, on theirs. It was the first conversation about the move that did not end in a sulk. They agreed Errol would need a few days to get used to the heat, and that he would probably want to see things. Alfie, it turned out, had a list.

Week one

Elf on the Shelf ideas for a new city

Claire made one rule for herself: every morning, one small Dubai thing, and nothing that took more than ten minutes to set up. On day two Errol was sitting in Alfie’s school shoe with a teaspoon of sand from the playground, as if he had been to the beach without asking. On day three he had written marhaba on the fridge in magnetic letters and spelled it wrong. On day four he was in the fruit bowl, counting dates into rows of five, and Alfie corrected his maths before breakfast.

On day five Errol had borrowed the car keys and parked a toy car in the lift lobby, because everyone in the tower seemed to drive everywhere. On day six he was wrapped in a hand towel at the edge of the bath with a tiny paper fan, complaining, in a note, about the humidity. None of it was clever. It did not need to be. Alfie was learning the city through someone who knew less about it than he did, and that put him in charge.

On day seven Errol was back at the counter with another bowl of noodles, which Alfie took as proof that he was still on Manchester time. Claire took it as proof that a good idea can be used twice.

Week two, Saturday

The desert, at a smaller scale

A colleague at the clinic where Claire worked had invited them to the desert with her family, and Claire used it. On Friday night Errol appeared on a baking tray full of sand from the compound sandpit, sitting on a plastic camel from a party bag with a strip of red ribbon for reins. The note said he had heard about the dunes and wanted to see if they were real.

They were. Alfie spent the afternoon running down them and the evening shaking sand out of his socks, and when they got home he put a pinch of it in a jam jar for Errol, labelled in pencil. It sat on the shelf for the rest of December. Later, when Claire asked what he had liked best about the month, he said the camels, and then the jar, which she took to mean that what mattered was the part he had been given to carry home.

Week two, Friday

One dirham across the creek

The abra idea came from Alfie. He had seen the wooden boats on a video at school and asked whether Errol could go on one. The next morning the elf was floating in the kitchen sink in a paper boat made from a page of the newspaper, with a coin on the deck. The note said he had heard you could cross the old part of the city by boat for a coin, and could they check.

They checked. They went on a Friday morning, before the heat built, and Alfie held the fare in his fist for the whole queue and handed it over himself. On the far side they bought a bag of nuts and walked through the old souq and nobody asked to go home. It was the first outing he described on the phone to his grandmother without being prompted. Errol, the next day, was asleep in a spice tin.

Week three, Tuesday, 6.40am

The morning it did not work

Some mornings the elf could not fix anything. On the third Tuesday Alfie woke up crying because his best friend from home had had a birthday party without him, and he had seen the photographs. Errol was sitting on the bookshelf holding a tiny sign about pancakes, and Alfie did not look at him once. Claire let it go. She rang her mother on video, early, and Nana made a fuss of him until he laughed, and they were twenty minutes late for school.

That night she changed tack a little. Errol stopped being only about Dubai. The next morning he was hanging from a piece of string across the living room, as if he had zip-lined all the way from Manchester, holding a postcard her mother had posted a fortnight earlier and Claire had been saving. It had a picture of the town hall on it. Alfie took it to school.

Week three

A Christmas countdown with two cities in it

The advent calendar had been the cheap chocolate kind, and by week three Alfie had stopped caring about it. What he cared about was the twenty-second, when Nana and Grandad were landing. So Claire turned the last ten days into a different Christmas countdown: felt stockings pegged along a string under the television, each with two slips of paper inside. One was a Dubai thing (a walk along the beach at sunset, karak tea from the cafeteria downstairs, the lights at the mall). One was a home thing (Nana’s mince pie recipe, a carol they used to sing in the car, a photograph of the garden).

Errol was in charge of the string. Some mornings he had swapped the slips round and some mornings he was inside a stocking with only his feet showing. The countdown was no longer to Christmas Day, exactly. It was to the day the two halves met. If you want to build something similar, our Christmas countdown and advent calendar ideas has more ways to fill one.

23 December, after school

A letter to Santa from a new address

Alfie wrote his letter to Santa at the kitchen table, slowly, with his tongue out. Most of it was about a bike. The last line said: “We live in Dubai now, in the tall building with the blue lights. Errol knows where it is.” He had been worrying, Claire realised, about whether Santa had been told about the move. Nobody had thought to mention it. Of course he had been worrying.

They folded the letter into an envelope and addressed it the old way, to Santa at the North Pole, and Alfie drew a map on the back, with the tower, the pool and the car park. Errol would take it that night, he decided. He knew the way, after all; he had done the journey himself three weeks earlier.

24 December, 6.05am

The last note

On Christmas Eve morning the envelope had gone and Errol was sitting on the windowsill, looking out at the city, with one last note. It said he had delivered the letter, that Santa had the new address now, and that he would be going back to the North Pole that night, where the weather suited him better. He would come back next December, it said, “to the same tall building”.

Nana and Grandad had arrived two days earlier, and they were at the breakfast table when Alfie read it out. Grandad asked whether he would miss the elf. Alfie thought about it and said no, because he was coming back, and anyway they lived here now. It was the first time he had said “here” like that. Claire went to put the kettle on, so that nobody would see her face.