Christmas Mystery

Today I was having lunch with Jen and Jamie, and of course since the holidays are right around the corner, we got talking about gifts. I told them that J told me that most of the gifts he got me won't fit under our small bedroom tree. This comment of course made me all curious about what he might have gotten me, and the realization of that curiosity got me thinking about the mystery of gifts in general. Because to me, that's what makes them special - the mystery.

Think back to when you were a kid. It's Christmas Eve, and you're so excited about the next day you can hardly stand it. It's the one night of the year that your parents can get you to go to bed early without your putting up a fight. You WANT to go to bed early, because Santa won't come until you're asleep. So you go to bed, and you lay there with your sheet pulled up to your chin, and you squeeze your eyes tightly together, and you wait for sleep to come. In your head you start imagining all of the things that could be waiting for you under the tree the next morning. From the small things like new toy trucks and Matchbox cars to large things like new bicycles or sleds or doll houses. Every year there was one present you particularly wanted, and you might even go to sleep that night praying for it. "Please, God, let Santa bring me that shiny red bike with the banana seat and the handlebar streamers. Oh, and if it has a basket with a flower on the front, that would be pretty cool, too. Oh! And a horn! Yeah, that would be neat."

The next morning, you're awake hours before the sun is due to come up. You look over at your clock, and it's only 4:30. You know if you go into your parents' room before 5:00, they'll kill you. So you either continue to lay there, wide awake now and about to bust with the anticipation of all of the gifts that are surely waiting for you under the tree, or, if you're a little less well behaved than I was, you sneak out to look at all of the presents, and find all of the ones that are for you. You lift them up and you feel them and you shake them, and you make guesses as to what they might hold. You put them back down without opening them, because you really don't want your parents to kill you on Christmas morning, but the suspense is killing you. Finally, 5:00 comes, and you can't take it any longer, so you sneak into your parents' room. What you don't know is that your poor parents were probably up until 3:00 in the morning putting stuff together, but even if you knew, you wouldn't care. You want to open stuff up! So you wake them. They look at you through bleary eyes, and tell you that okay, we can go open gifts now.

And then there it is - the moment you have been waiting for ever since your parents started shopping and being good for Santa became an important thing. You get to open all of your gifts! The array of shiny wrapped packages in front of you is almost overwhelming. You pick the one you think might be your most anticipated gift, and you tear into that one first (unless your parents make you wait on that one, like mine did). Before you know it, you have a pile of ripped up wrapping paper next to you, along with your pile of gifts. You ignore the clothes and practical gifts, and start playing with your toys, zipping from one to another, not even sure what to play with first.

For you, the holiday is now pretty much over. Christmas dinner doesn't really mean anything to you - for you, it was all about the gifts. And why? Because of the mystery! Those packages could have held the secrets to the universe, they had so much potential.

I went through a phase as a kid when I snooped and tried to find out what all of my gifts were before the big day, but then I figured it out. You have to make the anticipation last. If there's no mystery, the day is just another one, only with a lot of faked excitment thrown in. Christmas gifts are all about the mystery, baby. And I'm going to enjoy the mystery of my gifts as much as I can between now and December 25th. :) But now that I'm an adult, I also get to try to build the mystery about what I got for other people. It brings a whole new level of enjoyment to the mystery of Christmas.