My brother and I and our presents

I thought I would entertain some of you who read this (all 4 of you) with some stories about my brother and I and our Christmas presents in years past.

First of all I must preface this with letting you know that my brother and I are 5 years apart, I am older. We usually did not get along growing up until Christmas when it came time to scheme and search for our gifts (and when making fun of our mother, we do that well together).

One year Justin and I searched and searched and finally found our gifts hidden in a suitcase in my mom's closet. She was so mad at us that the next year she did not even bother to hide the gifts, she just sat them in a corner. It was so not fun. So we did not search for our gifts anymore.

My mom usually spends a good amount on us at Christmas. She is one of those people that spends the exact same amount of each of us down to the penny. If she has $20 to spend for each of us and the thing I want happened to be on sale for $10 then she would get me another $10 gift so that things were even. Because of this I always end up with more presents than my brother. He likes expensive things (as most males do) whereas I seem to prefer little things and the things I want can always be found on sale. So I usually end up with about 12-15 presents and he has about 8-10. It has become somewhat of joke now and Justin always says "so how many presents do you have this year" (read that very sarcasticly). Even Kaitlyn said the other day "Gran buys you too many gifts mommy". I quickly corrected her and said um, no she doesn't.

We open gifts with my mom on Christmas Eve. After opening she always has several stories about her good buys. She says "well the only reason you got that sweater is because it was on sale and then I had another 20% coupon so I only paid $6.50 for it". She is so proud of her good buys. I must admit though that I am so becoming her in this way.

My dad and stepmom always tried to think of clever ways to disguise our gifts. We would go over there and figure out what our gifts were before we opened them a lot of the time so they devised a plan. Our gifts were never labeled To Jennifer or To Justin. One year mine all said To Mom and Justin's all said To Dad. The next year mine all said To Pat (my stepmom's name) and Justin's all said To Fred (my dad's name). We should have caught on to that one because they didn't typically buy each other gifts and certainly not that many. Then the next year they said To Jennifer and To Justin and we thought oh good they have finally given up on this trying to disguise the present thing. So we get them all passed out and we are ready to open. Nope we had to trade. Mine all said To Justin and his all said To Jennifer. The next year they were labeled correctly but we were so used to different labels by then that we were looking for a pattern of who's were who's so we didn't get it.

Maybe this will give some of you some funny things to try with your kids when hiding or wrapping presents.