There was something so magical to me as a kid about waking up and seeing so many new presents under the tree. We’d get into bed, read "the Night Before Christmas’ aloud, and nestle each other quite vigorously in our beds. We’d be sure we could never sleep from the excitement of it all. But eventually we’d sleep. We’d wake up at some ridiculous hour like 4 or 5 and creep in to see the tree. The lights on the tree would be aglow and the presents would be there! So exciting!
The rule was that we were allowed to open and play with anything from our stocking, but nothing under the tree until the grown-ups were awake.
When I’ve been to people’s houses that open them on Christmas Eve it just seems… wrong. Anti-climactic. Less exciting and fewer surprises.
We open on Christmas Eve night. For one, it’s lovely by the light of the tree. For another, the old “everybody up at the crack of dawn Christmas morning” thing never appealed to my lazy parent self. :dubious: We always enjoy sleeping in, rousing and enjoying a nice meal, then maybe going out to see a movie or something. (not a religious household here…we celebrate the season)
Also, it was usually the case that we went and did Christmas day with family (our parents/sibs), so we had our “nuclear” family event the night before.
And I think it’s partly me getting my turn to make the rules, after all those years as a kid being forced to wait until Christmas morning! So there.
When we were kids my mother always had a gift of pajamas and a gift of a new outfit for us to wear the next day we opened on Christmas Eve. The rest we opened on Christmas day.
Now we are tight on money and I wanted to spend it all on fun stuff, no clothes. There’s only a few gifts for each of them so I want it all done that morning.
As noted in the Christmas Eve traditions thread, we generally do all the Christmas stuff on Christmas eve, except for the Christmas lunch. However, we used to open “Santa’s gift” on Christmas day. My family loves watching the local news, and it makes a big deal about tracking Santa. We kids would have gotten very confused if we got our gifts before Santa was supposed to have been by to drop them off.
Still, since we don’t do Santa anymore, I went with the second option.
So there.