Christmas, here there and everywhere.

Christmas present opening is done with my family on Christmas eve.  Also in our house we take turns opening presents.  There's an orderly process.  First, the ages of everyone in the room are determined.  Then the youngest person in the room picks a gift, (not their own,) and presents it to the recipient.  The recipient opens it, and we all ooh and ah.  Then the next youngest picks a gift, and so on and so on.  The advantages of this system is no-one's gift, either as a recipient or as a giver is overlooked.  The disadvantage of this system is it can take an long time to get through all the gifts (depending on the number of people, and number of gifts per people.  You do the math.)  But it also leads to a number of running in-jokes, referring to monkey paws, pictures of Dave or the "or you can have box number 2" tradition.

We all received a number of very cool gifts this year, but the best part was the gift seen multiple times in the evening.  Let me show you:

That's right it was a Merry Wii Chirstmas.

The biggest disadvantage of for us on this night is the dreaded get up before you even get to sleep to catch a plane to see the other half of the family.  But, this is our tradition and we love and build on our tradition every year.

In previous years, we got to go Atlanta, and drive to Chapin, SC.  This year, we got to fly all the way to Columbia, SC, and had chauffeur service (Thanks Claude!) pick us up and get us back to their house.  Where, in also a growing tradition, they let us sleep before going for the gifts.

The tradition there is Christmas Day opening of presents, with a distribution of presents by Claude, and everyone getting a little pile of presents in front of them and the chaos of opening everything all at once, with some oohing and aahing over particularily good gifts.  There are traditions here as well, including Dawn, Tanya and Rosie getting pajamas.  All in all, a good time.