Merry Christmas to ??????

Every family has different traditions for Christmas celebrations.  Some open gifts on the evening of Christmas Eve and others open gifts bright and early Christmas morning.  When our children were young we spent a great deal of time on the road between Larry's parents' home in Florence, Alabama and my parents' home in Booneville, Mississippi.  When we began our parenting career, we lived in Brewton, Alabama.  We brought all of our gifts and added them to the gifts already under Granny and Granddaddy Smith's tree and then did the same thing with Grandmother and Grandaddy Anderson's tree.  We opened gifts in Florence on Christmas afternoon.

Now have I mentioned in previous blogs that Lynda was really fast and with all that goes along with Christmas holidays, we didn't watch exactly what she was doing every minute.  She was where we could see her.  We could hear her and she was playing happily so we just went about our visiting until it was time to open presents.

Time to open presents....now that's where the fun began.  There were presents piled high under the tree wrapped beautifully.  I was usually the person who passed out the gifts to each person.  I picked up the first gift and looked for the tag.  Top.  Bottom.  No tag so I sat it down and picked up the second gift.  Same scenario....no tag.  Who wrapped the present?  Someone held up a hand.  Who is it for?  The person who wrapped the gift didn't remember.  Just look on the tag but that was the problem.  There was no tag.  There were no tags on ANY of the presents anymore.  The sweet little angelic girl dressed in her Christmas best sat holding Christmas tags in her hand.  Scattered around the room, we saw "the rest of the story".  Lynda had done what many children with autism enjoy doing.  She had taken all of the tags and put them all in one place.  Apparently in the mind of a child with autism all of the tags should go together.  I imagine if we hadn't come to open the presents, we would have found them all without bows, too.  There would have probably been a pile of tags and a stack of bows.

So, we changed the tradition that we'd all adhered to before Lynda.  Instead of handing out a gift to someone and reading who it was from, we now held up the gift and said "Who bought this gift?" or "Who wrapped this?"  IF the person remembered part A, we moved on to part B...who is the gift for?  That proved more difficult since a lot of gifts had been wrapped by the stores where the gifts were bought and really presents all begin to look a lot alike when they are stacked under the tree without tags.

The new system of "Guess who this present is for" proved more difficult than it sounds.  Many surprises like when Granddaddy Smith opened a slip that was clearly NOT his size or Granny or I opened a tie.  Even when a tie was opened by a female that we knew the gift wasn't intended for, we still had the interesting part of the new tradition of finding the giver of the gift and verifying if it was for Daddy or Granddaddy.  Only Lynda was safe because no one else wore size 4 Toddler clothes and most toys seemed to be for her since the rest of us were much older than four.  I don't remember much about what we all got that year but I do remember that we laughed more that Christmas than any before or after that year.  Lynda was oblivious to all of the confusion that her simple act of taking the tags off the presents had caused.  She just knew that the tags were as much fun as the gifts and the boxes and paper were best of all!

It took longer to open gifts that year.  The following year, we taped the tags on with lots and lots of tape and I began a tradition of putting a number on each box with a list of names corresponding with the numbered boxes "just in case".  LOL  None of us would have had that Christmas replaced with a traditional one where each box had a tag telling us who the package was for and who it was from.  It was too much fun to see if you could remember what your gifts looked like and who you bought them for.  If you were wrong then the fun began.  Lynda didn't sit still while we did all of this, of course.  So we took turns passing out gifts, guessing who the gifts were for then exchanging the gifts with the person that they were actually intended for AND trying to keep Lynda within view and snapping an occasional picture when possible.  Holidays were always the most difficult and exhausting for us as parents of a child with autism but we were young and had lots of energy.

That was almost 40 years ago.  I'm the only one from that Christmas remaining here on earth.  Everyone else....Larry's parents, Larry's Aunt Lib, Larry and Lynda are all together now in Paradise and I wouldn't be surprised if one afternoon they get around to talking about the Christmas that we played "Present, present....who bought the present and who is it for?"