If you have little impatient gift-peepers at your house who can't stay away from their gift under the tree, here's what I do:
Pick a number you associate with each particular child: how many home runs he hit in Little league, how many months old she was when she said "Mama", etc. Then instead of writing their names,write : TO:#3, FROM: (Mom,Dad,Aunt Susie,Grandma. whoever sent the gift). If you have to,make yourself a reminder note and tuck it away somewhere.
They won't know which gift to peep at, and after opening Uncle George's new pipe and Grandpa's foot massager, etc., and down the line, they will give up. Even if they get to theirs, they won't know for sure if it is theirs or someone else's!
Then Christmas morning, tell everyone their number and let them dig in and pass the numbered gifts around to each other. There is always confusion at some point, like when Great Aunt Nellie opens the newlywed wife's frilly nightie, thinking it was for her. The expressions are priceless, and the day starts of with the whole family roaring with laughter!
Next year, assign each one a new number.
Merry Christmas, and may God richly Bless You!
Source: I am a mother of six and grandmother of more
By Gloria Hayes from Darien, GA
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I swapped my kids names on their gift once (I put my daughter's name on my son's and son's on daughters) and like you say it was priceless because each had shook the wrong present and and had guessed each item wrong.
What a cute and clever idea!
I did this a few years back and the kids still talk about it! The kids (all 7) had been more like Dennis the Mennace that year, so I told them they had to guess the their gift number before they could open their first gift. Poor little Chelsea kept guessing 9 every time and wouldn't say another number.
My mother used this principle every year on us. But she would change it every year. One year it would be numbers, the next letters, the next a little picture (flower for one, square, circle, dog, whatever), one year it would be a dot of color. And sometimes she'd mix too. One person would have a color, another a picture, another a number, etc. It worked wonders for her, and I used the same method on my own kids. It's a fantastic way to keep them from opening too soon!
Gee, I wish I had read this back when my girls were young! I had to hide their gifts in the trunk of the car until Christmas eve as they would open them and look at them while I was at work and their dad was suppose to be babysitting, (tweens then).
For years we would find wrapped xmas gifts but with no tags so we didn't know whose was whose. After I moved away from home my mother explained that she used a dot system. She would pick a corner of the wrapped gift and mark it with dots (so many dots for each child). Then on Christmas Eve she would grab a bunch of bows with prenamed gift tags already attached and quickly attach them to the correct gifts.
My dad likes to write numbers and we have to figure out, but this year, he's doing girl's names. Patsy, Eliza, Ursula, and Nora. I'm a girl but none of those are my name or any of my family member's names. Good idea, don't you think?
I have labeled the tags as continents and planets, country capitals, the 12 days of Christmas, and the names of the three wise men. This year is more of a challenge. Each gift has "TO" as a city in a country one of them has visited but not the other two. And since we open our gifts one at a time. They have to open the gifts in the order of the 12 days of Christmas. For instance
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