Well, another Christmas has come and gone successfully. The kids are happy with their spread of new treasures and now we get to spend the day playing with all our new toys after spending yesterday celebrating with our family.
Yet, I somehow feel like we are failing as parents. We’ve yet to spend a Christmas Eve night awake until the wee hours of the morning assembling toys in what “unexpectedly” turned into a drunken stupor (which is apparently how good parents do it, based on the stories my parents and aunt/uncles tell).
We just haven’t had those really big, intense, assembly required gifts, yet. The biggest was last year when Sugarplum got a bike which took me no more than 30 minutes to put together.
We kind of pseudo do the Santa thing. I don’t really want to but hubby really, really does so we meet in the middle. We talk about Santa and have taken pictures with him the past three years. We leave gifts unwrapped and unlabeled. And the compromise is, we don’t say yay or nay to “Are these from Santa?” or “Is Santa even real?” We play dumb or redirect their questions back to them: “I don’t know,” “What do you think?”
I figure this is a great compromise because we aren’t lying to them but we also aren’t ruining the Christmas magic (or their childhood/lives as hubby tries to convince me). I take a similar approach with the Easter Bunny and Toothfairy (though I’ve gotten a little more into that one).
This year’s spread took me a bit of time but that’s more because we went with a building theme this year and I really like building so my sister and I went a little crazy but it was all worth is to see the looks on the kids’ faces in the morning.
Merry Christmas, I hope yours was wonderful as well!
