What is/was your Christmas morning like? Organized, or a free-for-all?

I do it the same way that my mother did it. My kids get up and come and get mom and dad out of bed. Then while my husband gets the coffee ready, the kids get to rip through their stockings. After that it is gift time. My kids hand their gifts out to us and each other first because they can’t stand waiting any longer.

Then I hand the gifts out. I organize them under the tree so that the first gift I give is on the outside. I also number them on the label so I don’t get confused. Luckily I only have two kids, so it is easy to keep track of which gift goes with which gift and to which child.

Free-for-all! When my dad was a kid he had a VERY structured Christmas morning. Kids couldn’t go downstairs till the adults were up, no one could open presents till after a long and drawn-out breakfast, then they could open their stockings, then they could do presents one at a time in an orderly manner… I guess my dad thought it was cruel and unusual punishment and promised never to do the same to his kids. Kids were allowed to get up as early as we wanted (usually 6 or 7) and wake the rest of the family, and we’d run downstairs and start shrieking and ripping paper off gifts and playing with toys and running around the house with our mouths full of candy… My dad passed away when I was 11 but we carry on the tradition, only now there are 6 kids in the family (there were only 3 of us back when dad was alive, now my mom’s remarried so the “old three” now have a stepdad and 3 new sibs who were adopted). We range from 6 to me (22) so it’s a big spread and always a joyous morning despite the chaos.

Every Christmas morning, I stayed in bed as long as I could, deliberately infuriating my wife and especially my children.

I yelled “Christmas, bah, humbug” from my bed. See they were not allowed to open anything until I came into the living room with a cup of very strong coffee. Most years my wife and I were up late assembling toys or wrapping other gifts while the children were upstairs and I was dead tired anyway. So I tried to stay in bed.

Now when they are all grown, (the youngest will be 19 tomorrow), they ignore my not being present and start at 7:00 am with their mother. At this point I get out of bed because I don’t want to miss all of the excitement.

We always took turns. But, as younger children, of course we’d see all the stuff from Santa instantly because in my family, Santa didn’t really wrap the big stuff.

My son is too young to really understand. We’ll let him open anything he wants, he’ll probably get hooked on something and then we’ll take our turns. Stockings always come first though. Scratch that, coffee does.

Organized. We do stockings on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6th. Presents are on Christmas Eve after dinner. Christmas breakfast around 10:00 am, with friends stopping by. Dinner around 5:00, then out to a movie in the evening. It was that way even when the children were small. We would go out to dinner Christmas Eve, and the presents would appear while we were gone.

For year it has mostly been organized. The youngest person hands out all the gifts then gets to open their own after. It slows them down and no one is left out or has the kid opening thiers in the excitement.

Usually celebrate Christmas eve. So Christmas day starts late and is easy going. Just hanging out with family and friends, eating and drinking and playing games or watching movies at home or someones home. No real plan.

No crazed ripping and tearing at my house, ever, now or in my childhood. But not a solemn single file either.

Once everyone’s had breakfast or coffee and assembled in the living room, we start. We usually have a lot of presents, not just one apiece, and one of the boys hands out one to everybody and sort of keeps them coming one at a time to each person and in parallel for all. We each open them admiringly, noting beautiful wrapping jobs, enjoying the punning hints written on the tags, showing them around, and voicing acknowledgments right then and there. That way we all see and enjoy all the gifts, no tags and thank-yous are lost, and yet it still moves along pretty quickly.

The kids used to be allowed to go ahead with their filled stockings when they got up early, and there was plenty of entertainment there. The one big present for each would always be the “stocking present” (all the rest were fairly small items, invariably including some clothes or pajamas). For the packages under the tree, they had to wait. In later years we would be in their rooms shaking them awake so we could get started.

I’ve spent two Christmases with families that had grabbing, ripping, tearing, screaming free-for-alls, and I was so disgusted that I almost felt ill.

My mother was SOOO organized ..we had to get up adn wait ‘till she had fixed her foffee or tea.

THEN; we’d go in and open gifts .. one person at a time… NO disorganization at our house ; even on Christmas morning…

Very organized until everyone sits down around the tree…

It was always kind of a free-for-all, but we would all have to be out there before anyone started opening presents. While my dad would get the video camera, my mom would always be like “wait until Daddy gets back to open presents” and then we would start. I don’t think we ever really crazily tore at them; my mom would make sure the paper and ribbons and everything stayed in one pile and of course, I always wanted to see everyone’s presents, so I wouldn’t go too fast. The only pattern we had to opening them is that we would dump out the stockings before opening presents.

@everyone: Thanks for the responses! I love all the different ways people have of doing things!

We have a bit of organized chaos. The kids wake us up before they go out to the living room, with the first one up practically bouncing on our bed until the last one is up. My husband goes out to turn on lights and get the camera ready while I make sure everyone uses the bathroom (crucial for little kids first thing). Then I join my husband, and when we’re ready we call the kids out. Because our daughter is older and faster than the boys, we ask the kids to hold hands and walk out to the living room together. That way, no one gets left behind or feels like they might miss something. Presents from Santa aren’t wrapped, but set up fully assembled and with batteries installed. Each kid has a small stack of gifts from Santa to go through, and then they take everything out of their stockings. Once that is done, I make coffee so my husband and I can wake up a bit. The kids are busy with their things from Santa, so we get a little breather.

We don’t wait too long to open presents, though. The kids each pick a place to sit, and we hand out presents one or two at a time, making sure everyone gets a turn. After the wrapping paper is cleared up, I start making a big breakfast. My in-laws come over they live right up the street from us to give us their gifts and open presents from us. We relax for a while, then start getting ready for the 2 hour drive to Christmas dinner at a cousin’s house.

When I was a kid, we did things much the same way. Santa was much more generous, to the point of being obscene, so that my brother and I grew up with kind of a warped idea of Christmas. The presents from Santa weren’t wrapped, and at some point we started a tradition of sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to peek at our presents. Anyway, after we woke our parents up, waited for them to turn on lights, and came downstairs to see what Santa brought, we had a looooooong wait to open the rest of the gifts. My dad liked to have coffee, make a big breakfast, and sit around for what seemed like hours. Then he’d drive over to my grandma’s to pick her up. When we finally got to open the other presents, we had to sit and open them one by one. My mom and dad would hand out presents in a specific order, so you opened your “best” present last. Sometimes you’d be about to open something, only to have it snatched away from you because Dad or Mom suddenly remembered what was in it and decided it had to be opened after some other present. My dad was big on trying to disguise presents so you’d have no idea what you were about to open. He was even known to mislabel gift tags on purpose to throw us off. As soon as the presents were out of the way, my parents would start cooking for Christmas dinner.

It is always an organized free-for-all. It’s a free-for-all in that folks of all ages and degrees of sobriety are tearing off wrapping paper while dogs and cats are dashing through the accumulated drifts of paper and ribbons.

It’s organized in that we always have it at my brother’s house and not ours. It makes it so much easier to clean up after.

On Christmas morning, we all gather round and take turns, in order of age, to open a present at a time. If you sneak off to take a quick bathroom break and your turn comes up, it halts the whole process and creates quite an aggravation within the group, so best to monitor your tea consumption.

The rest of the morning is spent playing with all the toys received, then a light lunch, and then the whole family crashes. If someone were to wander into our mother’s house mid-afternoon on Christmas, they’d find bodies laid strewn on every bed, sofa, and sometimes on the floor and might think that there had been a mass murder, quite possibly conducted by the lone nephew who stayed awake and is hacking away on Mom’s computer. Dinner that night is orchestrated by our 80-something year old mother who still holds the secret to the best turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, and most importantly, The Stuffing.