I grew up on Bungalow Street. It isn’t a weird street name to people who grew up in my town, but when I started to make friends outside of my little town, I learned it was a little odd.
There were lots of big families in my town. There are six siblings in my own family. That didn’t seem like a big family, until I started to make friends outside of my little town. The biggest family on the three blocks of my street had 11 kids. That was a big family, but certainly not the biggest in town.
The next door neighbors had five kids. And when Christmas came ’round, they turned into a very crafty and sneaky bunch of kids. I don’t know if their parents ever knew, but they would surreptitiously unwrap each of the presents under the tree before Christmas and then rewrap them so that nothing seemed to be amiss on Christmas morning. And so they’d know what they were all getting.
My mom was a little bit crafty and sneaky herself. She would not put our names on our gifts. She came up with a new code every year. Sometimes she would number the presents, or she would mix up the names on them. Even if we would have opened the presents (which I’m not sure we ever would have, but she wasn’t taking any chances) we wouldn’t ever know who they were actually for…so what would be the point.
Kudos to my mom for her pro-activity in keeping Christmas a surprise!
What about you? Did you ever try to find out what you were getting before Christmas? Did your parents do anything devious like my mother did?
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