Do you put your presents under the tree as you buy/wrap/receive them, or wait until Christmas Eve?
Usually we put 'em out as they flood in, but with the Liddle Twiddle only 2 years old, I suspect the temptation to unwrap 'em would prove to much for her. Plus we like the idea of giving her the magic of waking up Christmas morning and for the first time seeing the pile of gaily wrapped and beribboned gifts.
Twiddle
Put them under as we get them. Gifts we’ve wrapped but not delivered yet also go under there, assuming they’re not too big.
I want to add a question of my own–do you organise them into piles for each person, or just have them assorted randomly? We do the latter, but my father mentioned once that his family always did the former. It seems like it would take some of the fun out of it. The question of “do I still have any gifts left?” wouldn’t be there, and half the fun is hunting for the ones that are yours.
It is only the two of us, but yes, we put them under the tree as we wrap them. This is almost exclusively for me since I still take such a childlike delight in Christmas. And we don’t put them in piles by name, but take turns opening them on whatever day we end up celebrating before we go to his parents’ house.
A tree without presents is like Santa Claus without a beard.
And the beard needs time to grow…?
We, personally, put ours out Christmas Eve - er, my mom does Christmas Eve night so really Christmas - so we can still wake up to find them in the morning.
Santa delivers the presents on Christmas eve at our house, we usually leave some cheese and crackers on the mantle for him.
We always put them under the tree as we wrap them. It heightens the anticipation, and half the fun is shaking them, pinching them, and trying to figure out what they are. It also adds to the festive decor, and gives us time to appreciate/admire them. We include gifts for people who will be visiting us on Christmas Day. We don’t put them in any order, though personally I try to make sure each one is at least partially visible, not hidden behind anything else.
Stocking stuffers, on the other hand, never go in the stockings before Christmas Eve.
We have way too many to put out as we wrap them, and when the kids were little we didn’t want to spoil the surprise. We don’t sort - someone, usually a kid, distributes presents.
This year my daughter’s boyfriend got his old toy train from home, and set it up to go around the tree and the living room. The plan is to distribute the smaller tree presents with the train (which is large gauge.) This is going to be interesting
When we were kids, the presents from my mom and dad went under the tree as they were wrapped. So did anything we got for each other. Santa gifts came out on Christmas eve night after we went to bed. Now that we’re much much older and there’s no one anywhere near to believing in Santa, everything goes under the tree now though we still fill each other’s stockings on Christmas Eve.
-Lil
We randomly place them under the tree as they are wrapped/received. The cats take great joy in mauling the ribbons, but we don’t mind. They remind us of the simple joys of the season.
Oh, and the stockings get filled Christmas morning, while the other is in the shower. 
Now. Makes it easier to remember where we stashed them, and the only others besides me and my wife (the cats) don’t care.
As we go.
When I was a kid, they came out on Christmas night. With my own kids, the gifts from us went under the tree, and gifts from Santa arrived, well, on Christmas.
Gifts at my house go under the tree as soon as they were wrapped – which every year up until this one has been: Christmas Eve. Not that I’m a procrastinator or anything. One Christmas Eve we ran out of tape at about midnight and I sent my husband out trying to find a store of some kind that was still open. He finally went to a hotel and borrowed a roll of tape from the desk clerk!
This year I am promising myself I will start the process real soon. Like tomorrow, after we get the tree up and decorated, since I already have some gifts on hand to wrap.
Of course, when the children were really little, I thought it was cool to have the presents magically appear overnight. Wrapping until 3 a.m., to be awakened a few hours later by eager children was somewhat less cool.
Living at home, they were put under the tree all at once a couple weeks before Christmas. Before then, they’re stockpiled in another room. Then we spent the next half month chasing Sebastian, my cat, out from behind them. I miss that little nuisance.
Now that I live alone, I don’t do trees. Too much work for me alone to see. And besides, I can see the office next door’s pretty tree from my kitchen at night if I want to see something holidayish.
I gotta give the man credit for finding a creative solution. I doubt it would have occurred to me.
Yeah, he does push the envelope a lot. Of course, sometimes the envelope doesn’t have a stamp on it.
We put ours out as we wrap them, and they tend to be grouped, just because we see this set of friends at this time, another set tomorrow, and there are some similar names. I prefer to put Jay B.'s gift with his wife’s, and Nephew Jay’s with my brother’s family group so I don’t have to write “Jay B.” or “Nephew Jay” on the card.
Makes Mr. Kat crazy - he tries to group them ‘artistically,’ but believe me when I say that my brother would have a coronary if Nephew Jay opened the San Andreas Grand Theft Auto Strategy Book that was meant for Jay B.!
They used to go under the tree as they came (except for Santa gifts and stocking stuffers which we sneak in on Christmas Eve). However, mom’s latest dog seems to like ripping up wrapping paper and chewing on the presents.
So now they go out at the last possible moment.
Ours go under the tree as they get wrapped, sort of in groups – Christmas Eve, which we do with the in-laws, Christmas, which we do just with this family, and Christmas party, which we do with my family on the following Saturday. So we have presents under the tree from about ten days before Christmas until maybe a week after. The kids’ presents from Santa, however, go out in front of the tree after bedtime on Christmas Eve. It can’t be any sooner because those are unwrapped. The stockings also get filled then. We don’t have a Santa-believers any more but they still get a present from him. I don’t know what we’ll do when they all move out and there’s nobody here to wake up for Christmas morning anymore. Oh, well, we’ll figure that out when the time comes. Things change as the family does.