Elf hides in Bluffton yard

BLUFFTON — There's an elf hiding somewhere in Dana and Heather Koontz's yard. His name is Jasper, and early each morning he moves to another hidey-hole. "It's Christmas time, hip hip hurray! I've hidden somewhere in this display and will move each day! My friends call me Jasper the Elf. Can you find me? I'm the Elf on the Shelf!" a sign in the front yard at 199 W. Kibler St. reads. Koontz said this is the first year he has tried the Elf on the Shelf idea. "It's been a hit to say the least," he said. The spark for the idea came during a vacation in California last year, according to Koontz. "We were out looking at lights and a house had something similar, not exactly the same. They just had a decoration of an elf on a shelf," he said. "I was like, Oh, you know what? And my wife was like, no, no, no." But when Koontz told her the idea he had, she thought it could be fun. "We just kind of went with it," he said. The challenging part, said Koontz, was finding an elf to hide outside. It couldn't be too big or too small. He finally found a blow mold figure at a garden store. "It was pretty much the right size I was looking for. It didn't have the elf on the shelf colors or anything, but that was the closest thing I could find," said Koontz. So he bought the 2-foot-tall hollow plastic decoration and bedecked the yard the week before Thanksgiving. "And I set it out there with the sign and everything. And we call him Jasper, and Jasper was sitting right beside the sign," said Koontz. Not long after, two of his neighbors happened by. "I was sitting in my chair just watching TV, and I saw her walking through the yard. So I walked outside and the other one is standing in front of the sign," he said. They were looking for the elf. "It's right there," he said, pointing to the elf by the sign. The hunt started Dec. 1. "I think maybe the weather's kept some people away. It's been so cold. But I've ran across a few people who said, as soon as it gets nice, we're going to bring our kids down and look for him," Koontz said. Although some people are already on the hunt to find Jasper, he said. "They've gotten some messages asking me to hide it on the Columbus Grove-Bluffton Road, on that side of the house, so they can drive by and try and find it in the morning as they're going to work," he said. Koontz said he wanted to do something special for his 10-year-old grandson and have something interactive for the community. This seems to fit the bill, he said. "And I've never seen anybody else do it before," he said. Koontz, who works at Procter & Gamble, usually moves Jasper early each morning. The challenging part is trying to find a good spot for him. "There's only so many spots in a yard," he said. Koontz plans to keep up the game until Christmas. "When Christmas day comes I'll turn the sign around and on the back it says 'See you next year,' with the elf's feet at the top," he said. Jasper was his grandfather's name, and Koontz inherited some old wooden and painted cutouts from his grandparents. "So they're in the yard as well. So he kind of started the whole thing years ago back in the '80s and so I still have those and put those out as well. But I thought what a nice way to honor him and keep it going," said Koontz. "I try to add to it a little bit each year. Next year, I don't know if I'll be able to top this one but we'll see what I can do," he said. The yard also features lights, seven or eight blow molds and his grandfather's cutouts. Koontz said their yard won last year's lighting contest. "I wasn't going to enter. I felt like you spread the wealth, spread the fun," he said. But some high school kids worked on those wooden cutouts. Some of them were motorized and used to move. They haven't really moved since the '80s." The high school robotics teacher took a couple of them and got them working. "So I felt like since they did a bunch of work on getting them to move, we'll enter one more time and see if some of their hard work can pay off," he explained. Koontz eventually hopes to pass the cutouts down to his children if they want them. "I love doing it and plan on doing it until I can't," he said.