When do you open your Presents?

Posted by dodo

Lovers open their presents together before Christmas; the neglected open theirs when they arrive in the New Year. The Germans open theirs around six o’clock on Christmas Eve. The Royal Family, being largely of German ancestry and because they spend most of Christmas Day going to church, also open theirs on Christmas Eve. An eighty-foot-long trestle table in the Red Drawing-room is used to pile up the presents which are handed out by Prince Philip.

Because my maternal grandmother became pixilated with Prince Albert and all things German, it also became our family tradition to open our presents after dark on Christmas Eve. The tree, always more beautiful at night, was lit for the first time, and after opening we then had the evening ahead to play with our presents, leaving my mother free to stuff the turkey and pack up our stockings. It was my first real experience of hypocrisy. Having been through the present drawer with all the sensitivity of an airport frisker while my mother was shopping, I knew exactly what I was getting and had my gasps of simulated delight and amazement to perfection. My cousins, who were glamorous but lacked self-control even more than I did, had always bullied their mother into letting them open their presents by two o’clock in the afternoon.

Christmas Eve seems a sensible opening time. Having had one bite of the cherry, children are less frantic to wake up in the middle of the night and open their stockings, and with Christmas dinner still ,to come the goodies are more spread out.

When you open presents on Christmas Day depends on when you have Christmas dinner. In the old days, if you had it at lunch-time for the sake of the children, you upset the servants, who didn’t like getting up at five in the morning to put the turkey in. But if you waited until evening to dine, you had to put up with fractious, exhausted children.

If you open presents after breakfast, it seems too near opening one’s stocking; no one gets up at the same time, so you have to hang about waiting; you miss the beauty of the lighted tree; and you have to rush off to church immediately afterwards, or be plagued to assemble some plastic toy as you desperately try to get Christmas dinner under way.

If you open presents at midday, the children won’t want to eat much Christmas lunch, because they’ll be longing to get back to their presents. If you open them after lunch, you won’t be able to linger at the table because the children will be so desperate to get unwrapping.

My husband’s family used to open the bulk of their presents on Christmas night, after dinner had been washed up and breakfast laid, by which time I’d practically expired with anticipation. My husband remembers his parents having the same argument every year at Christmas breakfast when the children were young, when, as a sop to such a long wait until the evening, they were allowed to open presents from people who were immediate family. The row was always the same: `Dad said my mother’s mother wasn’t family, and Mum said the aunts, my father’s sisters, weren’t, and a shouting match then ensued, year in year out.’

When I was first married my husband, thinking that opening presents on Christmas Eve was too decadent for words, made me stick to after dinner on Christmas night, but gradually over the years I and the children have worn him down to about four o’clock on Christmas Day, and then we dine at eight, which seems the best arrangement. Most people like what they’ve been brought up with and feel faintly martyred if a lifetime’s routine is changed.

Only open your presents in the privacy of your own family. Everyone reacts to Christmas in different ways. Some people go berserk and give each other hundreds of presents, from the dogs, the cats, the fox in the woods and the goldfish, but some don’t. There is nothing more embarrassing than opening a pile of presents in front of someone else who has nothing. Princess Diana very sensibly avoids the mass opening in the

Red Drawing-room and opens presents alone with her children.

Do remember to leave the bills in ‘by mistake’, then everyone can change everything next week.

If you all have lots of presents from different people, make a chart before you start and as each present is opened, write down who it came from, as by Boxing Day you won’t remember, which makes thank-you letters very embarrassing.

Some people remove half the presents from very small children and dish them out during the year in times of crisis. This sounds a good idea, but it never works with my children who have memories like computers, when it suits them, and would have instantly missed the smallest toy.

Don’t be too hasty to throw away the wrapping-paper. I’ve lost several silk scarves and gift tokens that way.

Always keep a few spare presents back in case you need one for the ghastly dropper-in who arrives on Boxing Day, laden with goodies. I bet Mary cursed the wise men when they caught her on the hop in January.

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