A childhood belief about father christmas

My parents used to tell my brother and I that if we were bad around Christmas time, that Santa would send his elves to take away the Christmas tree and that the elves checked on us during the night from outside our bedroom windows. To make it more believable, my dad made some scrapings down the snow covered sidewalk and made little mitten prints on the outside of our frosted bedroom windows, and told us the next morning that he saw the elves dragging the neighbor kids's Christmas tree down the sidewalk and that he also saw them come and check on us, then proceeded to show us the drag marks and the mitten prints - we were both mortified and we never did dare go to the neighbor's house to see if the tree was really gone or not for fear of being associated with "bad" kids in Santa's eyes!