Christmas Day

A few years ago, I read some ideas about Christmas traditions. One was to use plain white paper for the name tags and write the name in white crayon. When the time came to open the gifts, the kids were given a marker to "decode" the name on the tags. I loved the idea and used it that year. The kids were at first stunned, not knowing what gifts were theirs. After being handed a marker, they went to town decoding their gifts. From then on, they expect me to do this each year. Even this year, they asked, weeks before Christmas, if their presents would be coded. I love that they still enjoy this. Each year, I spread their gifts among our six Christmas trees. They select one gift at a time, bring it to the center of the room, "decode" it and once each of them has a gift, they can unwrap it. They have fun decoding, and I enjoy how it slows down the present opening process. Hard to tell how long they will ask for this, but I will enjoy it while I can.