My Christmas Morning Tradition

Andy checking his stocking on Christmas morning

December 14, 2014
Day 228

I grew up in a large, three-story house--large by necessity, because ours is a very large family.  I have five brothers and five sisters, and though not all of us lived under the same roof, most did.  That meant we needed the 7 or 8 bedrooms and three bathrooms we had.

So as you can begin to imagine, Christmas morning was VERY BIG when I was growing up.  7 AM was the start time, and there would be no deviating from that, my sister Marilyn and I made sure.  We must have been awake by 6:30 or 6:45 at the latest, and we quickly began making sure the entire household was getting up.

Our tree with presents for each other ready to be unwrapped

My adult brain can't even conceive of such an early start now, nor can I understand how my family allowed us to make this happen.  (I can only guess that as children, we were the main focus of attention in those years, and they enjoyed how much we loved Christmas morning.)

So picture the scene: it's around 7:00 AM on Christmas morning, my parents have gone downstairs now to plug in the tree and start the coffee.  "Ooh, Santa was here," my mom or dad might say.  My little sister and I are sitting at the top of the second-floor landing, surrounded by several of our older brothers and sisters. 

"Okay," my mom or dad eventually tell us, and like a herd of elephants, we stampede down the stairs and into the living room, each of us taking seats around the large room. 

That's right, we didn't even rush to the tree to start opening presents.  The excitement of the morning needed to be paced out just perfectly.  We looked at the tree, and saw what my child brain guessed were about four hundred thousand presents, but we waited patiently for my parents to run the show.  Stockings were taken down from in front of the fireplace first, and we each had one.  Then, once we were done with that, my mother would begin handing us presents, one at a time.  "To Sean, From Santa," I'd hear, and my excitement was off the frickin' charts. 

The whole process would take maybe 45 minutes at most, but it was so much fun, and so amazing in hindsight to experience it as part of such a large family.  I'll never forget those years, and I'm so grateful to my parents and siblings for always making it so special for us.

Now it's just Andy and me, and though I love him more than I can ever possibly express, I do still miss the way things used to be.  I do my best though  to make our Christmas morning special anyway.  I get up first, always earlier than Andy, and now I'm the one who makes the coffee and turns on the tree--and I plug in all the other Christmas lights too.  I set the mood with some Christmas music, and then I wait.  And then I wait some more.  And then, after a while longer, I keep waiting, hoping Andy will soon wake up. 

The kid in me is still very much there, I realize all the time, and Christmas morning will always be incredibly special to me.  No matter how old I get, no matter how many years continue to pass, I still have all the excitement of that little boy sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting for the magic to begin.