christmas memories
My mother loves Christmas. Every year it takes about four hours to open all of the gifts. Not because of the amount of presents, but rather because each and every one must be opened separately, and everyone has to admire the gift before moving onto the next one. Breaks have to be taken for coffee and tea, phone calls, restarting the Christmas CD.
One year my mother had it all worked out to where she decided what gift was opened when according to a small number that she had written on the tag of each gift. She held the master list that said what each number corresponded to. So as not to confuse which #7 was mine and which #7 was my sister’s, she had each present with its own unique number.
We couldn’t look at the list because it had all of the gifts written on it.
The problem surfaced when Mom realized that she had made this list late at night, and after the gifts had been wrapped. Thus when she thought #16 was a sweater, it turned out it was batteries for a gift that hadn’t been opened yet. I remember my mother curled around the list on the couch, trying to both decipher her numbers and sheild us from peeking. We would just sit there looking at her and then she’d declare, “Try number eleven.”
