Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Toothfairy. This is the trifecta of magical creatures our parents lied about. They visited our house while we slept and left gifts or money.

Life was simple.

Sometime between my childhood and that of my kids’, things went completely off the rails. Personally, I blame Pinterest. Suddenly every December, we’re expected to create daily tableaus of the antics of poorly behaved elves. On Halloween, fairies trade bags of collected candy for something more exciting (what happened to good old gorging?). But my vote for the most unnecessary of all contrived holiday traditions? Leprechaun Trapping.

What in the fresh hell is this?

Allegedly (I’ve learned all this from Pinterest OF COURSE), kids are supposed to engineer traps out of household garbage (QUICK! HALLMARK! TRADEMARK THIS SHIZZ. WHAT IS TAKING YOU SO DAMN LONG? SELL THEM TO THE MASSES!), bait it with some chocolate coins, and wake you up at the asscrack of dawn to figure out that they suck at engineering.

BUT WAIT.

Of course their trap failed. That was the point. The real fun begins when they discover all his retaliation based trickery! HAHA!

The problem with this is twofold. For one, I don’t need my children sleeping ON MY FACE for the next decade. Additionally, I’ve cleaned enough bath crayon off the surfaces in my bathroom since the Great Crayola Christmas Mistake that if I ever have to do it again, I’ll slam my head in the medicine cabinet.

Who decided that Leprechauns (defined as “small, mischievous sprites”) take green dumps all over everything? Not that I’m above finding potty humor occasionally hilarious (our household owns not one, but TWO piles of fake excrement). However, this seems unnecessary.

Also, I’m not Irish, so I don’t actually know, but as a people, do they have a reputation for spiteful bowel movements? I’m confused.

This seems like a colorful way to die.

Congrats to this forward thinking trickster for avoiding the grout, however, I don’t love my kids enough to craft a hundred tiny footprints on all the washable surfaces of my house. You know what’s magical? Sunsets. Skipping rocks. Climbing trees. Not me on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water, performing a one act play entitled “Begrudging a Crapping Tiny Man”.

What’s stopping us from going full over-achiever? Buy this, then wake them up:

On second thought, that may cause some real accidents.

*Side note: If we’re going to start taking the magical childhood this far into the weeds, I propose we start leveraging this sorcery for everything. You’d better believe my kids would start putting their crap away if I told them The Cleaning Chupacabra would devour everything not in its place after they went to sleep, and possibly drop a deuce on their bed if they left the house without making it.