What's up with the gifts?

One thing I enjoyed when I was growing up was going to see relatives. My mom had nine aunts and uncles from Grandma Bend's side and almost all of them lived within a 3 hour drive from our house. My father also had a large number of aunts and uncles, but they were scattered all over the country, so we didn't see them that often. Nevertheless, Mom's family was more than enough for us.

It was even better during Christmas when I was much younger, because we would show up somewhere and the relatives there would give Loyd and me little gifts. Sometimes they were toys, sometimes candy, but they were wrapped up very nicely and felt like Christmas Day had arrived a little early and gave us something to occupy our time until the Big Day arrived.

After I turned eight, I noticed that these same relatives stopped offering me door gifts, but they still gave them to the younger cousins. I was taken aback by this. I didn't realize that you reach an age in which you're too old to get trinket gifts. It was a very sad realization to know that Christmas would not be the same at that point.

So that does appear to be a part of growing up. What you receive around Christmas becomes less as what you give becomes greater.

This brings me to my next point, which is the receiving of the gifts that supposedly came from Santa. As the nearly weekly beatings Loyd and I received from Dad would attest, we had been fairly naughty during the year. However, come Christmas Day, we got almost everything we asked for.

So, what happened? Could Santa not see that we were bad? Or maybe he also saw that we got severely and unfairly punished, so that evened things out? I will tell you that it was clear it didn't matter how bad we were. We still got stuff from Santa.

I have to wonder if everything we got from Christmas was a result of Mom and Dad feeling guilty about the way they treated us during the rest of the year. That makes a lot more sense.

So now, when I see kids getting everything they want for Christmas, I get a little miffed because I know they likely did not suffer all year long as Loyd and I did. I appear to be of the mindset that you need to suffer to make Christmas truly worthwhile.

I realize it's not very healthy to think that, so I'm glad that Christmas only comes once a year.