Given today’s prompt, my Blogmas entry for today could be incredibly short. The answer being, all at once.
But then that wouldn’t strictly be true because I don’t literally open every single gift at once and it would also make for very boring reading! So Let me elaborate on my “all at once”.
Growing up we would do stockings as soon as we woke up, in our jammies, before breakfast. Our stockings were smaller gifts, in our house Father Christmas didn’t do the big presents. And I liked that, even back in the magical days of believing in Santa, mum and dad still got most of the credit, the way it should be. When we opened our big presents and everything else really depended on where we were spending the rest if the day and if my dad was playing at church. If he was and we were going to someone’s house for the rest of the day, we would then open everything else after breakfast and before church, so that we didn’t have to cart lots of unopened gifts over to other people’s houses.
Now however, we just do everything before breakfast and then rattle of church, obviously seeing various other family members at other points over the festive period and saving gifts to and from them until we see them.
That said though, when I talked about Christmas traditions, it is interesting to see, as new people have come into my family, the different ways they do presents and how we’ve tried to incorporate that too.
My step-mum’s family open one present at a time starting with the youngest going up to the oldest, it spreads things out and means people see what other’s are getting. My sister-in-law’s family put everything in one pile, someone opens a gift and then they have to go and choose one for somebody else and then the process carries on, again it means that everyone is watching each other and it spreads things out. However, as we found out last year, if there is a 1 year old in the house who the majority of gifts are for, that method can go a little wrong… “Oh, it’s for Noah again!”
I love the fact that when and how we open our gifts is something that is so unique to each family and seems to be such an obvious thing to each family… “Of course we open our gifts like this. Why would you possibly do it any other way?!” This tradition is one of those things that I’m looking forward to instilling in my own family one day… if I’m honest it will probably involve a treasure hunt.
Lex xx
Lexisms 