Christmas - open presents on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day?

In my house, we opened wrapped presents from my parents on Noche Buena, the major holiday for Hispanics anyway.

On Xmas Day, Santa left unwrapped presents around the living room. I never got the point of wrapping Santa presents -- leaving them unwrapped created the impression of realism, a tight schedule, etc.

lol Santa being like "do u want a gift or a Charles Kincaid masterpiece?"

never have Christmas with my family nowadays (live on different continent) but when I was growing up - apart from when I was a little kid, when it was always first thing in the morning on Christmas Day - it was after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. technically the early hours of Christmas Day. I didn't attend midnight mass generally, but when my parents got home from it we would do the gift giving.

my dad is from Chile so that's where the midnight on Christmas Eve bit comes from. in Chile you take the kids out looking for "el viejito pascuero" (the little old man of Christmas) before midnight and then you come back home to find the gifts have arrived (you usually have a big family meal also). we only had xmas in Chile twice when I was a kid though, and I was too old to believe in Santa or el viejito by that stage

Christmas Eve? B-b-but I thought you guys had to wait for Los Reyes Magos.

Fucks sake can we get a hidden tag on jims santa spoilers pls

We've never celebrated that shit. Too late!

I'm pretty hardline about xmas day only. I'm realizing lately, since everything is upended this year, how much of a staunch traditionalist I am re: xmas and pretty much just xmas (if only my family's own idiosyncratic version of such, as we're not the slightest bit religious). I deeply need things to be the way they're 'supposed' to be! I'm working on my ability to accept that absolutely nothing is going to be the way it's supposed to be this time 'round. Might as well open the goddamn presents of goddamn xmas eve, with every other thing going to hell, grumble grumble...

We used do christmas morning until the folks chose it to announce theur separation, after that we kinda just did yknow whatever whenever

When I was a little kid it was always on Xmas morning. Xmas eve was reserved for dreams

Later on we went to midnight mass together, but we still waited until the morning to open presents.

Now I open them as soon as I get them

When I was little, back when Moș Crăciun (literally Old Man Christmas) was still Moș Gerilă (Old Man Frost) according to the communist authorities, we would aim for the 25th but would almost always end up opening our presents on Christmas Eve. We subsequently stopped pretending and now it's always on the 24th, sometimes in the afternoon.

Btw we use the Gregorian calendar for Christmas and the Julian calendar for Easter. Same thing in Greece and Bulgaria iirc.

Christmas Eve, as good Germans.

our ritual was (and is) that my brother and I open one gift each, one of the ones we got each other, on Christmas Eve. the tradition morphed to be "gag gift night", where we select the gag gift we got each other and have the other open it. then open the next morning with the parents. sig others, we do later Christmas Day, tho I haven't had a Christmas time relationship in ages so solves that problem.

only one other time did we do Xmas Eve, when we were going to Ft Myers to visit our Aunts on Christmas. this year, we're doing Christmas Eve as my bro works on Christmas (gotta make a paycheck).

the gag gifts have kind of escalated, to where the last two years, the gag gift was been the most expensive gift I got him.

last year he got me a Jon Taffer shirt, I got him an autographed photo of MC Hammer. year before, a canvas painting of Steve Urkel. this year, autographed photo of Dave Coulier.

Haha I like that idea!

I have friends who have a tradition of giving each other the same recycled gift as a joke back and forth over years

Most of my life Xmas Eve has been the dominant time for opening gifts. But sometimes it's necessary to be flexible about this. Whatever works.

lol, glad to see that gag gifts are so popular. They just get admixed into the general gift-giving morass in our family. Last year I gave my brothers a headshot of Dr. John and a production photo from the forgotten '80s television Amish drama Aaron's Way. All down to long-lasting inside jokes. Got my sis some Golden Girls magnets this year. No particular reason beyond bewilderment and laffs.

She will see the biggest gift will not, in fact, be from you

the Neanderthal clan. and I got his gift wrong - he got me a Rick and Morty Chia Pet

oops

https://i.ibb.co/XDbPSzp/48428794-10108813282238592-5048474945365999616-o.jpg
upload pictures to internet free

lol

xpost lol, very nice

We'd gotten in the habit over the past couple of years of stopping off at a Dollar General on the way to my mom's and ferreting out the weirdest, creepiest, goofiest shit we could find as stocking stuffers. I'm pretty sure I have pictures of some of these horrorshows around here somewhere.

My dad's side was an Eve family, due to German heritage. My mom's was a Morning family. So obv we went with mom's tradition and opened Xmas morning. After awhile they let us open a single gift in Xmas Eve, prob to settle us down.
Eve seems awkward: my dad's mom and other adults would have to come up with some ploy to get the kids out of the house on Xmas Eve, yet have at least one adult in each household remain home to plant gifts.
I always kinda looked down on the Eve families, like they just didn't have the willpower to wait til the next day.

Always Christmas Eve because my dad is from Germany. We’d have dinner with another German fam and then the dad’s would hang back while we went to 5pm mass and set out all the presents.

So guess Santa came while we were at church. I don’t ever remember thinking that was weird. I loved it. Still do Christmas Eve now.

If I’m with my actual family, we do it Christmas Eve and have done for at least fifteen years now. We haven’t done Christmas Day since most of us stopped being children. It’s just me and my husband this year, so we’ll do it on the day I guess? Hadn’t really thought much about it with everything going on.

both :D

i skype w Aus family on US christmas eve/Aus christmas day & open their presents -

and then open my yankee presents on US christmas day

I'm putting flexible. Growing up we'd open presents on Christmas Eve at my Italian grandparents' house. Now we split it up, but leaning more towards Christmas day.

In Finland they're always opened on Christmas Eve. The first time ever I opened them on Christmas Day was in 2018 when we spent the Christmas with my sister-in-law's family in New Jersey.

Oh, and here Santa Claus doesn't sneak in your house while no one sees him, he comes to visit the kids and hands out the gifts in person on Christmas Eve. Meaning, a member of the family (typically the granpa) will usually dress up as Santa, or some people also hire a Santa - it's quite a profitable gig for university students etc.

Christmas Day only even with divorced parents, split families, etc.

With Father Christmas bring chocolate and satsuma (and other ephemera) on Christmas morning but present swapping between family members is saved till after lunch. This always seems fairly hard on young children, which there hasn’t been since my brother stopped being one. At one stage it got to being after both lunch and a post lunch nap on the sofa.

Now it’s hard on my nephew, there’s some quality playing with trains time we’re missing out on.

there's a thing in the UK about how late you open your presents on Christmas day correlating with how posh you are. Not sure about how Christmas Eve fits in, I suspect some mixture of proper Christian Mass means it's ok or suspicion that it's a foreign custom.

I've never heard of that tbh.

I read it on the discourse

Oh, and here Santa Claus doesn't sneak in your house while no one sees him, he comes to visit the kids and hands out the gifts in person on Christmas Eve. Meaning, a member of the family (typically the granpa) will usually dress up as Santa, or some people also hire a Santa - it's quite a profitable gig for university students etc.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, December 23, 2020 4:03 AM bookmarkflaglink

"Santa, you smell like Steel Reserve, just like Daddy!"

Always Xmas morning, but sometimes we might open a small gift on Xmas Eve. Like a gift-appetizer

my mum used to leave a "stocking" on our beds when we were asleep (actually a pillow case) with stuff like chocolate, usually an apple or orange and some small gifts like toiletries or socks and maybe a book, which we would open as soon as we woke up. then usually we would have Christmas dinner at my grandparents so we would open the presents there. So Christmas day, always. although I think the timing varied as to whether it was before or after dinner, like if it was running late we'd open them before, but I think we would normally open them after dinner (by which I mean lunch)?

suckers I already opened mine

did u open bofa them

just the one lol

I was raised to open one present on Christmas Eve and the rest on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, I rarely get more than one or two presents nowadays.

Ditto on the single gift (if there are kids about) on Christmas Eve. Otherwise, it's the fun of delayed gratification, being surrounded by presents on Christmas Day, looking around at others' reactions to your gifts. Funner too if it's so laid back, everyone's comfortably coffee'd up and breakfasted, and the unwrapping is casual and slow. (After writing that, now hearing it in Barry White's voice.)

i tell my folks not to worry about getting me stuff, as I basically buy shit for myself year round, but they still think I'm 12 and do it anyway. i just enjoy being with my family.

my brother, otoh, needs to get me stuff cos he annoyed me growing up.

i imagine parents hate when the gift unwrapping is done because then the kids start asking them to set up the toys they just got

do any of u just throw the instruction manual at yr kids and say "HERE, learn something!"?

Christmas Eve was the Gom Jabbar Test of Humanity. If you open anything then, you die.

used to drive my mum crazy by delaying my present opening whereby i would open one on xmas day then randomly open the next whenever it was i was bored/needed cheering up. she finally had enough one year when i still had 2 unopened presents at the beginning of march! the next xmas i 'only' got 2 gifts and one was a games console with the other containing the games.

I remember as a kid one present under the tree was driving me wild, trying to figure out what it was when feeling the shape of it. Finally parents had enough of me going on about it and let me open it on xmas eve. It was a pack of AA batteries. Bought for me to fit the Tomy 3D Tank Attack they had also got me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWFXWrzMc64

sky attack, not tank attack

and yet neither of us took that tech one step further and got acquired by facebook

used to drive my mum crazy by delaying my present opening whereby i would open one on xmas day then randomly open the next whenever it was i was bored/needed cheering up. she finally had enough one year when i still had 2 unopened presents at the beginning of march!

Hardcore!!

i imagine parents hate when the gift unwrapping is done because then the kids start asking them to set up the toys they just got

We're still at the age (just) where you have to set up as soon as the first one is open. It's cute they can play with them without tearing through the pile but Death To Manufacturers of fiddly 'press-out mechanical models'. On the plus side they can have one while I'm trying to cook lunch and it'll keep them occupied.

i had an elderly great aunt who lived alone a long way away, and as she got older and older she never missed sending gifts & cards for birthdays & christmas, god bless her. but as years went on the gifts got more and more eccentric - things from her pantry, magazines stolen from office waiting rooms, loose plants, used curlers, etc. We were a strict xmas morning gift opening family, but after a certain point, so that xmas morning would go smoothly, we decided to start opening aunt lillian's gifts on xmas eve bc they often needed immediate attention & disposal. it became its own fun tradition.

My family - Christmas Day, always.

Wife's family - Polish Catholic with the Christmas Eve, always.

This will be the first Christmas for either of us without our families.

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Love that, OEO

I’ve only spent a few Christmases without family or fiends, in the past only because I was working.

thinking of all of you this Christmas Eve

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Growing up I’d get to open up one gift on Christmas Eve, then the rest on Christmas Day.

Advantage of Xmas morning: you get pics and video of families in their pajamas

Advantage of Xmas morning: you get pics and video of families in their pajamas