What a lovely Christmas this year. I really can't remember a nicer one. The gifts were a little scanty, but a lot of fun was had by all. I have to blow my own horn a bit, because I think that some of the ease and fun flows from the Family Tradition that I have been fine tuning since Grant could play with presents. The inspiration came from him: on the first Christmas where he could walk and play with things, I noticed that he could have spent the entire day playing with the one little farm toy that was his first gift. I, however, was in a mode from Christmases past, and wanted him to stop playing with the farm and open his next present. And the one after that. After all, we needed to take turns, and we had places to go and people to see. What resulted was a completely overwhelmed (and eventually cranky) toddler, and a tense, stress-filled Momma.

In years following, I decided to have breakfast and snacks out early for everyone to nosh on as they pleased. If Grant opened a gift that he wanted to explore, we just let him. We'd read the book, let him play with the toy, whatever, until he was ready to move on. So present opening takes several hours, which is, after all, just fine. The change this year is that in the past, I still tried to keep with my family's method: taking turns so all the presents ended up relatively even. This year, if Grant was off playing with a race track or play-doh dog, we just continued on opening at a leisurely pace til he was ready to be in the mix again. This did result in him having some presents left over to open after everyone else was done. And so what? His presents lasted all day, and by the time he was done, he seemed pretty satisfied with the day. No tension, no rushing, just relaxing and eating and opening a gift here and there. Very nice.

Kit of course had no idea what was going on yet, and in fact napped thru a couple hours of our fun. Made for a happy baby. She'll have more fun next year, I'm sure!