In today's guest post, Lauren shares her family's exciting gift-giving tradition — and the unexpected results of one surprising season. Check out her blog, Oh Lordy!
When Allie asked to for guest posters to share holiday pasts, I had a hard time thinking of one favorite memory. There have been canceled flights, Christmas eves spent in the airport, surprises spilled weeks in advance, taking a million self-timer pictures to get one shot of the dog looking straight ahead. But above all else, when I think back on my younger years, I’ll always remember our Christmas scavenger hunts.
Growing up my brother and I used to be notorious for getting up at the break of dawn Christmas morning, running down the stairs and ripping open our gifts. Looking back at it now, I feel bad for my parents who usually stayed up late putting together gifts and finishing up the last minute wrapping just to turn around and get up early to watch us tear into our presents.
As my brother and I got older, my parents tried to add a little excitement by hiding some of our gifts in the form of a scavenger hunt. We used to love following the clues around the house to find the rest of our presents. As time passed, Mom started to run out of clues for the hunt, so she would just hide our gifts around the house and then tell us to find them. Only problem with this is that she wouldn’t always remember where exactly she hid the gifts. Let’s just say, one year as we were moving the living room couch in JULY to clean the carpet, I found some forgotten Christmas gifts from 7 months earlier.
I loved those scavenger hunts and can’t wait to continue the tradition with our future kids.
My mom wouldn't put tags on them so that we wouldn't know which ones were ours! She always forgot then and had to rip open the corner to figure it out- happened every year!
ReplyDeleteWhat a cute tradition! Something similar happened one year with us during an Easter egg hunt. Good thing we were using plastic eggs because our house would not have made it months with a hidden hard boiled egg!
ReplyDeleteLauren
Fizz and Frosting
Totally not Christmas-related, but I always wondered what the point was in hard-boiling and decorating eggs, I had no idea that people used them for egg hunts just like the plastic ones!
DeleteWe had a rule that we could open our stockings unsupervised, but the gift opening itself was tightly controlled by my uncle. My husband's family is a bit more rushed than mine -- I want to bring back the one-at-a-time gift opening when we have kids.
ReplyDeleteWe tore through ours, but I agree. As I have gotten older, I really enjoy seeing everyone opening their gifts. Hopefully we'll be able to do that with our kids in the future.
Deletethe scavenger hunt is so cute, and i love that it turned into your mom just telling you where to go. i can totally see myself doing that--setting up scavenger hunts seems like a lot of work!
ReplyDeleteLOL, I never knew who hard until I tried to do it one year for my brother's gift. It was one and done for me, coming up with those cute clues is tough!
DeleteI always love scavenger hunts! Once our parents say that it’s time for scavenger hunt, all of us will be excited. That’s the start of the super cool and creative way to give and receive gifts! I’ll definitely introduce this game to my future children as well. :D
ReplyDeleteRosalinda Hone