I had vowed to write about something other than the holidays this week—but Charlie Brown Christmas is on, and I just got some new ornaments for the now-decorated tree, and I can’t help but get excited about Christmas morning.
My fiancé and I bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas. We were shocked when we walked into the Best Buy last night and they still had one in stock, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend the Christmas season on my parents’ floor playing Mario Kart with our Wii Wheels.
Proud of our purchase, my fiancé then called his friends to let them know we’d gotten one. They promptly invited themselves over to play. Unfortunately for them, we informed them that we would be abiding by yet another of my “rules” – Christmas presents cannot, under no uncertain terms, be opened before Christmas morning. Aside from “early” Christmas presents like my new Christmas tree skirt, or the first ornaments my parents bought us, I refuse to give in to the desire to break open that new video game system and start playing.
I do the same thing with birthday presents. Even when I was in graduate school and my parents’ birthday presents would arrive weeks early, I would let the boxes sit on my apartment floor until midnight on my birthday, or, when I was exercising the utmost restraint, until the following morning. There’s something far too anticlimactic about opening them early—then there’s nothing to look forward on the day of.
The same thing goes double for Christmas. I still go to bed before my parents on Christmas Eve, and I still refuse to see the presents around the bottom of the tree until Christmas morning. Although their new house is only one story and it’s hard to go “upstairs” anymore, I always go hide when it’s time for Santa to come. To that end, I plan to wrap up our Wii and put it under the tree at my folks’ house, because even though we both know what it is, I want the joy of finding it under the tree and opening it and playing with it all day long on Christmas day.
Perhaps it’s something I will grow out of when I have my own children, and I’ve learned to appreciate the joy of their smiling faces on Christmas morning, as opposed to my own refusal to grow up. For now, however, I am having a hard time letting go of the little girl in me, perched at the top of the stairs, waiting with baited breath to be told I’m allowed to come downstairs and see the tree.
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