[HPFGU-OTChatter] Christmas presents - one at a time or all at once?

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

At 8:23 PM +0000 11/23/03, aaoconnor2002 wrote:
>
>How do other people from large families handle this?

My parents and both sets of grandparents all lived in the same town 
(indeed, the parental units and the one grandmother still living are 
still there).  Moreover, my parents belong to different churches.  So 
we had a longstanding process we went through for the holiday:

Christmas Eve: At about 8 pm, Mom's church holds its Christmas Eve 
service, which is traditionally delivered by the children - the 
teenagers do the longer readings and stage-manage, the middle 
children do the bulk of the readings, and the small children sing. 
(There was some question, especially since it was a fairly small 
church, as to when one was no longer a child and therefore not 
eligible to participate in this event.  I argued strongly for 
graduation from high school, but was outvoted by the adults, who set 
the cutoff at age 20.)  My grandfather was the organist for the 
church.

After the children's service, we all returned to my maternal 
grandparents' house for cookies, hot chocolate, and caroling. 
Granddaddy would play the organ, and we would sing four-part harmony, 
at least until the cookie crumbs started getting in the way.  Mom's 
family always opened gifts on Christmas Eve when she was growing up, 
so we exchanged gifts with the maternal grandparents and the aunt who 
still lived with them.

Midnight: Dad usually went to Midnight Mass at his church.  I always 
begged to be allowed to come along, which I finally was allowed to do 
my junior year in high school.  Mom, who sings with the choir at his 
church despite not actually being a member, occasionally also came, 
and if she did I wasn't allowed to - I was the eldest child and thus 
got baby-sitting duty.

Christmas morning: The presents usually had been set under the tree 
the Sunday before, but there were always a few more under the tree 
Christmas morning than there had been.  My parents never held any 
truck with Santa; we had been told that he was a myth, or at most a 
symbol of the giving spirit of Christmas, as soon as we learned about 
him from our friends.  Generally, each child (there were four of us) 
took a present, and then we all opened them at once.  No effort was 
made at opening them neatly unless there was a reason to conserve the 
paper.  After we'd all opened them, we showed off what we got to the 
other children, who typically expressed envy (as a number of our 
presents were always books, this was often expressed as: "I get to 
read that second!").  Mom and Dad typically opened theirs late in the 
process, as Dad typically videotaped the event and thus had his ands 
full, anyway.  Afterwards, we had breakfast, and Mom and Dad debated 
whether Dad would go to Mass that morning (he only did if he'd missed 
the Midnight Mass the night before; I don't know why they always 
debated whether he would attend a second one).

Christmas day: Around noon we would head over to my paternal 
grandmother's house and have dinner with that side of the family. 
This side was sufficiently large that they did the name-swap in early 
September, with each nuclear family buying gifts for one other 
nuclear family.  However, it was also traditional for our grandmother 
to give a couple of gifts to each grandchild, and for godparents to 
give their godchildren a gift.  Usually one of the uncles would play 
Santa and sit under the tree, distributing gifts, which was also done 
a round at a time: everyone got a gift, then everyone opened theirs 
at once and thanked the person who gave it to them.  The adults 
usually ran out of gifts before the children, so the last few 
"rounds" were rather ragged.

Frighteningly enough, we still do something very much like this, 
minus the services, even though we never spend Christmas with my 
family anymore - we do a small Christmas Eve exchange with friends, a 
Christmas morning exchange with each other, and a Christmas afternoon 
exchange with the Spouse's family.

-- 

  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles(at)earthlink.net
"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the 
act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. "
	- Gauss, in a Letter to Bolyai, 1808.