My Christmas Story.....

Our family spent this past Saturday going to out to a Christmas tree farm...looking for the "perfect tree"... The weather did not cooperate... SURPRISE! But we finally did find "the tree"... Is it perfect? Probably not but for our family it will more than do the job! That trip out to Newark, IL got me thinking about Christmas growing up as a kid in the south suburbs of Chicago. i am telling you right now, we did some down right funny stuff at Christmas!

The big thing at our house was....
CHRISTMAS PRESENTS ARE ONLY OPENED ON CHRISTMAS DAY... PERIOD... END OF DISCUSSION... so we figured okay... if that's the rule we'll stay up all night until the stroke of midnight on Christmas eve and then those presents were ours! Er, wrong.... not until about 6 or 7 AM were we allowed to open presents... that was still okay... we'd wait!
The only problem was that as little kids it's real easy to misjudge the impact that trying to stay up for about 24 hours straight might have on your little body! So we (uh i mean, I) came up with a brilliant plan!

Growing up in Park Forest, my mom and her sisters over several years lived together which meant that we often had our cousins living in our home and vice versa. Anyway, one of my favorite cousins when i was a kid was my cousin, Chris. He was about two years younger than me but man he was a funny kid! It just so happened that one Christmas he and i made a decision to stay up together on Christmas eve until we were given the final "all clear" to open the presents. After talking about various methods that we might use i came up with a brilliant (and pretty funny plan). Since caffinated coffee was not on our list of desirable drinks, we settled on something else. In our home there would be various canned goods, (canned the "old-fashoined way... in jars) and often the empty jars were then reused for various things. My idea was that if one of us saw the other one falling asleep we were to take one of the jars and knock the other one on the head with it... what can i say... it worked in the cartoons!
Being the older of the two i didn't care what it took... i wasn't getting bonked on the head and sure enough, Chris began to fall asleep and i got the chance to hit him in the head with a canning jar... i don't know if it helped or not... but he did have a huge knot on his head the next morning which was the source of several angry questions about how we could be so stupid... but we laughed our selves silly about it.

Frankly i don't remember what we got that Christmas but that memory has stayed with me ever since and every single time i think about it, i laugh... i don't know if Chris laughs about it or not but knowing him, probably.