Opening presents on Christmas Eve

Do you do this, instead of waiting until Christmas morning?


This is another one that makes no sense to me. As kids, we would've LOVED if we could've opened ONE of our presents early but we never could, they all had to wait until Christmas day except for the ones the neighbors brought on Christmas Eve night....now we had a neighbor, our infamous little nightmare across the street, and his mom let him open ALL of his presents on Christmas Eve night as soon as they got home from our party because it would've been too much work to get up early the next day and let him do it then. That way they could all just sleep late. Even as a kid I couldn't think of a more boring way to spend Christmas, as soon as knew it was morning we jumped out the bed to see our presents.

Our family opened gifts on Christmas Eve, but Santa's gift was always under the tree next morning. That worked for me but I imagine Christmas Day was pretty uneventful for my parents. Perhaps it didn't bother them.

My husband, on the other hand, did everything Christmas morning. As we've done since he and I hooked up.

But I tried many times to start a tradition of opening one gift on the Eve. He just wouldn't do it.

Yeah, we could never do that as kids and I don't know why because we had quite a few. But NOW, that we're grown, we pick a night a couple of weeks before Christmas and each just open one present.

My mom never allowed that. We always had to wait until Dec. 25 and not 12 am. We had to wait until AFTER we went to sleep and woke up at a normal time.

It has been a family tradition as long as I can remember and we continued it. Open presents Christmas eve and then have the big dinner Christmas day. When I was a little girl the family was much larger than it is now, everyone would come to gramma's house and two of the older grand children got the honor of passing out the presents to all assembled. Every year we opened our presents one person at a time starting with the youngest which was me for my first 10 years. One year we changed the line up and started with the oldest my grandfather. I don't know about my cousins but I really loved that year. Then I loved every year. In fact the year I was 16 my aunt and uncle brought his young cousin to our Christmas eve celebrations. I didn't know it at the time but I had met my husband to be that night. We have continued the tradition and it seems the proper way to do things to us. I have read that it is the old German way , and that is possible because Gramma was of German extraction.

Now we open our gifts on Christmas Eve when we were younger we used to wait for Christmas Day.

We opened our gifts on Christmas Day.

RobbieFTW wrote:My mom never allowed that. We always had to wait until Dec. 25 and not 12 am. We had to wait until AFTER we went to sleep and woke up at a normal time.

Just like my parents. They didn't allow presents to be opened before the sun came up on Christmas day. If I ever have kids, I wouldn't either.

We were allowed to open 1 gift on Christmas Eve, I loved it.

Nah we don't do that here....wait until Christmas morning.

My parents made us do that & I hated it. It was as if Christmas Day didn't even exist. Put a stop to that shit when I was on my own.

Just the idea of that seems wrong to me. I had friends whose parents let them open their gifts on Christmas Eve but that wasn't happening at my house.

If we are home, we let my son open one on Christmas Eve, then the rest in the morn. At Dad's, we usually open them all up on Christmas Eve. Which, really is fine to me. It does make for an uneventful Christmas morn, but we get a lot of visitors and used to be interrupted all the time on Christmas morn. there.