When kids are infants, they don’t understand what it means to receive a gift, let alone open one. It’s when they’re about three years old that they start to get the magic of Santa and the joy of opening presents. As parents, we were eager to watch our son, our first born, experience this. So eager we almost created a monster.
Christmas Eve, after Payton went to bed, we stuffed his stocking and put out his Santa gift. I don’t remember what we got him. My memory was more around how eager I was to see his reaction the next morning. Chad and I got up early so we wouldn’t miss it.
When he came out of his room Christmas morning, Payton didn’t notice. He’d seen the gifts under the tree and the added gift wasn’t registering. So we urged him over to the tree and showed him his gift. When he realized it was his, he was thrilled to focus his attention on his new toy. But he still had a stocking, so we urged him to put his new gift aside and explore what was inside the giant sock. Candy, trinkets, and Legos. Payton was happy to open his Legos and start building. But we still had the gifts under the tree to open, so we urged him to put his Legos aside and said, “Hey Payton, put that down. Look at this one!”
Suddenly Chad and I stopped. We looked at each other, realizing what was happening. We were pushing our son to dismiss every gift he got so he could see what was next.
Could we really be surprised next year if he presumptuously asked for his next gift? Nope. It would be our fault for teaching him to do exactly that.
That’s not the kid we wanted to raise.
We paused. We let him build his Lego set. Chad opened a Lego set too, and they built them side-by-side. We’ve continued this tradition ever since. Everyone gets a small Lego set in their stocking and we pause while everyone puts theirs together. And we give fewer gifts. Everyone gets a gift from Santa and one gift from Mom and Dad. Just one. As our family grew (we have four kids) they got each other one gift, too. So there are a lot of presents to share. But we take our time, and we let everyone spend a few moments enjoying what they got before moving on.
The Frampton Clan 