While Abby is a typical early-riser, and those genes don’t come from Berta or me, neither of the kids have yet discovered the Christmas morning ritual of waking their parents at 5am with “Can we open our presents now?” Thankfully. No, I’m about to ruin my good fortune by saying we’ve been strangely lucky in our ability to sleep in until 9am or so before the kids stir. Still, there’s a lot to do on Christmas day, and sometimes it seems more like work than a Holiday should bring.
We’ll usually get up at say, 9am. I’m sure that as the kids get older, this will change and be earlier. We need to give a reasonable amount of time for Santa to place gifts under the tree, so we’ll have to enforce some limit on the time before we can go downstairs.
We’ll do our present opening shortly after we wake up. Our past years of gift unwrapping has been kind of odd. I’ve never met kids so unenthusiastic about opening gifts. I think they need to pace themselves. Maybe a better plan would be to open a few gifts at a time throughout the day. Not that they won’t be opening gifts all day, as you’ll see.
After gifts, which likely includes some coffee for the parents, we’ll do breakfast. I’ve been convincing Berta to make this “traditional” - at least it’s a tradition for us now that we’ve been doing it for a few years - New York-style baked cream cheese French toast. There’s a special stoneware dish she cooks it in, and it’s basically small-square French toast with cream cheese and maple syrup baked in. There’s usually also some link sausage and orange juice.
We’ve been inviting my dad over for breakfast, which I think may end up being a second breakfast for him, since he’s the early riser (I knew it came from somewhere), and we do our gift exchange with him in the morning and loaf around a little to let the kids play with their stuff. Somewhere between our initial present opening and breakfast, someone runs to my mom’s where my brother stays when he comes to visit, and transports him to our house to visit with us and my dad.
At a late lunch time, Dad rolls out and Berta and I stare at each other while the kids play and seem to forget about the second meal of the day. Pat doesn’t usually seem to care about food, since he’s often still on Pacific time and probably still isn’t even awake.
Shortly after that Mom and Nana roll in. We do round three of gift exchange. As I said, the kids have stuff to open all day. Last year we got two Christmas trees, one for the living room and one for the family room, because there were simply too much gifts. Not that I wish anything bad on anyone, but perhaps the recent economic downturn will reduce that this year. If not, we’ve only got one tree this time, so I’m just going to be chucking new stuff into the basement as it starts to pile up.
Gift exchange with Mom, and then dinner. I don’t remember what we did last year, but Mom’s bringing dinner to our house this year. We’ll probably eat dinner, play with our toys a little bit, and then Nana will get tired and want to leave. This usually happens around 5pm. I kid. 8pm. If she would just put the dishes in the washer and not putter all evening maybe she wouldn’t wear out so quickly, but then again, maybe she does that to keep herself busy and then doesn’t know what to do with herself after and that’s why she wants to leave. Perhaps we should find something that would keep her entertained in the evening.
Anyway, that’s a pretty full day.
And then on the weekend we get to visit my in-laws: Three of Berta’s sisters’ and their parents’ worth of Christmas packed into virtually a single whole day 220 miles from home. Pack the books, it’s going to be a long trip.
I think last year was similar and went smoothly, although we ran a bit late in the morning. I think we’re going to adjust times this year, so that things work out even more smoothly. The ultimate goal is to depressurize Christmas for everyone. It’s supposed to be a joyous/fun holiday, and although forcing joy and fun ruins it, I think the word “relax” is the key to success. We’ll see how it goes.
