My Family's Unique Christmas

Ever since my children were young, I would always wrap the Christmas presents in a different wrapping paper for each one. When the grandchildren came along, I did the same thing. My first grandson always got the Santa wrapping paper. He was first, he had to know Santa.

When the second grandson came along, I had to use Snowman paper as he had such a fat round face. I kept the Santa wrap for my older one. I never had to put the boys names on the wrapping as I knew it.

It was funny as no one caught on to what I was doing, when they finally did, I changed my thoughts and started numbering all the packages instead of putting any names on them. This drove them crazy as no one knew which present was for them. Now, most of the wrapping were different.

I had #1 for my daughter as she was the first born, my son was second so he got #2, my first grandson was #3 and the last one was #4.

After doing the wrapping the way I was doing it for so many years, I decided to get creative. I was shopping one day and saw some boxes that had 12- 2"x2" little boxes in them. I bought four of them, one for each child. I didn't know what I was going to do but I am creative.

While doing my Christmas shopping, I knew I had to have enough gifts for each child to fill 12 boxes. When I didn't have 12 gifts, I filled in with cash. They all totaled up to the same amount of boxes.

I put a colored sticker on the back of each box, one for each person. When wrapping each gift, I put the correct color sticker on the gift that was for the right person, I never put a name or number on the packages.

Of couse, I kept a list of the colors so I knew on Christmas Day what color everyone had.

The first two hours everyone was there, was just great. Of course the four of them, older two included, were going under the tree looking for some signs of which package belonged to them. Of course there was nothing on the packages but a small sticker. They had no idea what was going to happen.

My daughter, the mother of the two grandsons, was worse than the kids. So was my son who is a year younger than my daughter.

After we ate, I had the two grandsons take all the gifts from under the tree and line them up on the living room floor according to the color code that was on each one and they were also numbered from 1 to 12, so they had to be in order too. That took about 45 minutes to an hour to get everything moved and lined up in nice neat rows.

All the gifts were numbered, but there were some spaces between everything as the small boxes that had money in them didn't have a gift under the tree. That really confused everyone. They kept going back to the tree to look for the missing gifts. I loved all the confusion!

My husband was in charge of the boxes. We showed the kids the boxes and we had everyone's name in a pot. My husband was in charge of that. He picked the first name out of the pot and that person had to pick a number out of a hat that represented the little box they were allowed to take out of the bigger box.

After getting the little box out of the main box, they had to follow the instructions that was on the paper. Most of them said to open a certain number present. Some of them had cash in it. I had some $2 bills and silver dollars etc. After they opened their present, they would pick the next name from my husband.

This was nice as all the presents were not torn apart within five minutes and everyone got to see what the other person got. It also controlled the garbage and no lost parts for anything.

It got to be funny as the younger grandson kept getting all his money right after each other and the older one didn't. He thought he was forgotten where the money was concerned. He was happy by the end of this as he got the his share of the money too.

Now I have to come up with a new idea that is bigger and better than last year as the kids are getting older and wiser.

Everyone said they loved the whole thing and it took a few hours to get through it all. Usually all the gifts are opened and its over in less than an hour. I loved seeing the faces on everyone, especially on my grandsons face as he kept thinking he was being forgotten.