Family Life

My greatest Christmas fear, a very early morning, was groundless. Daniel was the first to rise, as usual, but the rest of us managed to relax in bed till about 9. You know you’ve grown up when you’d prefer Christmas morning came later, rather than sooner.

Debbie and I had put the gifts under the tree the previous evening, after the boys were asleep in bed. Thus, Daniel was terribly excited when he saw them all piled up in glorious splendour in the morning light. Debbie got up with Daniel, since we didn’t know how much supervision he’d need to resist such temptation. But he was very good about not touching–difficult for a three-year-old–and so another fear was laid to rest.

Debbie made breakfast and got the boys up and dressed, while I got to sleep in some more. This was my first Christmas gift.

We had a good breakfast, read the Christmas story from Luke 2, and sat down around the Christmas tree to open gifts. We started with the stockings and moved on to gifts under the tree. Daniel happily opened gifts until he came to a book. That was it for him. He was off in his own world. No more gifts until he finished browsing his book. He’s the son of his parents.

Joel wasn’t interested in opening gifts. He wanted to pull them from the pile and hand them out. It was more fun to give gifts to others than to open them himself. When I tried to persuade him to stop and open his gifts, he’d say “Daddy do it”, and go off to hand out some more.

Micah only wanted the wrapping paper, preferably with nothing in it. All the better to stuff it in his mouth. We tried to keep him occupied with large pieces of paper that were too big to eat, periodically clearing away the shredded scraps from the battle of paper vs. baby.

Lunch was scrumptious. The afternoon was pretty quiet, punctuated by the occasional scream as one child appropriated the gifts of another. I watched The Very First Noel DVD with the boys–excellent, by the way. We finished off with a delicious baked ham for Christmas dinner.

We all enjoyed our day. The boys were well-behaved, their gifts were exciting and appreciated, and Debbie and I got some quiet time together to ourselves in the evening. That doesn’t happen often. It was an excellent Christmas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 at 11:21 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated if this is your first time, otherwise they will appear immediately. I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.