Holidays Day 5

Most people have lots of presents under their Christmas tree in the days leading up to Christmas Day.  We didn't have any presents under our tree until Christmas morning - a tradition my mom started for three reasons.  The first reason she always gave was that Santa brought all of the presents on Christmas Eve.  I have to admit that it was pretty cool to wake up on Christmas morning (I was always the first one up in the house) and see presents all over the living room.  All of Jason's presents were wrapped with one kind of paper and all of mine were wrapped with another.  My mother was all about equality of gifts, Easter Eggs, etc.

As we got older, we started to wonder why gifts sent from out of town or from other relatives didn't go under the tree before Christmas.  Then my mom gave us the real reason gifts didn't appear until December 25th.  When she was little, she and her three brothers would unwrap and rewrap each of their gifts under the tree so that by Christmas morning there weren't any more surprise gifts.  My mom wanted to make sure that Christmas morning was always a surprise.

Now that I'm older, I think there was also a third reason for this Appling tradition - procrastination.  My parents hid most of the gifts in the trunks of their cars and waited until we went to sleep on Christmas Eve to do most of the wrapping, bike assembling, etc.  We always went to the late Christmas Eve service, so this meant my parents started their own wrapping party around 1am.  Who knows when they went to bed, but I think we were usually up around 8am.

For all three of the reasons stated above, I think we'll continue the Appling present tradition at our house.   Neither of our cars have a trunk though, so I'll have to get creative about where I stash Santa's loot.