Congratulations. You have survived another Christmas.

Now, your only holiday responsibility is to start shopping for next year’s presents.

As a kid, I enjoyed the day after, when I did important things:

1.    Assemble, play with and become acquainted with all my neat presents.

2.    Get one of my seven sibs to trade me one of their neat presents (two if they were an easy mark) for a sucky pair of white ring-top socks from Grandma, who gave me socks every year since my first Christmas. (She wanted to give them to me when I was in Mom’s womb, but I hadn’t yet developed feet).

Today, the day after gives me time to look back and relive the excitement of a childhood Christmas in a large Catholic family.

My holiday excitement began the night before when we kids were expected to do the impossible – go to sleep. My body was electric with “can’t wait to see my presents” energy. I lay in bed with my mind dancing with images of toy cars, bikes, electric trains, cap guns and how I was going to talk my brother into a sock-related trade.

For the record, we called them “presents,” not “gifts.” Gifts were for the upper class. Presents went to the middle class. 

One Christmas eve I was so amped up I tried physical exertion to fall asleep. I did bedside calisthenics, pushups and used my pillow as a war club to beat my bed. My parents used gentle encouragement to coax us into slumber:

“If you kids don’t quiet down up there and go to sleep, I’m going to start a fire in the fireplace so Santa can’t get in,” announced my parents.

Mom and Dad tried to trick us into sleep, with advice like:

“If you go to sleep, Christmas will come faster.”

“Santa is still watching for bad kids.” 

“Your father is going out to get an armload of firewood, better be asleep by the time he gets back.” 

When I finally did achieve slumber, I would awaken around 3 or 4 a.m., still stoked and pumped. I go from bedroom to bedroom waking up my sibs so we could gather at the top of the stairs, jostling for pole position, eagerly awaiting our parents’ permission to go downstairs. Instead, our parents, who had been up all-night wrapping presents and assembling Schwinn bikes and Radio Flyer wagons told us:

“Go back to bed. It’s not even light out! We’ll get you up in two hours.”

When you’re a kid-in-waiting on Christmas morning, two hours lasts two weeks. It was like doing hard time in solitaire.  

By the time the sun rose I had grown a beard and a foot taller. We again crowded the top of the stairs, my parents gave the go-ahead, and we flew downstairs, sometimes two and three steps at a time, and into the living room that was aglow with eight tall piles of neatly wrapped presents. 

They didn’t stay wrapped for long. We commenced a frenzied hurricane of unwrapping that registered a 3.5 or 4.0 on the Richter Scale and often resulted in injured fingers, deep paper cuts and putting someone’s eye out. 

Paper, ribbons, bows and name tags whirled about the room in chaos to eventually settle in a massive debris pile. This pile also contained mistakenly thrown out toy parts, batteries and toy instructions. One year, my little brother ended up in the pile and was thrown out with the trash. We didn’t know it until the next day when a neighbor phoned to say that there was a Hefty garbage bag with legs, wandering around our yard. Who knew?

Christmas cards were ripped open, turned upside down and shaken to see if any cash fluttered out. If not, they were Frisbeed into the paper pile, which by now was spilling over into the dining room.

If we opened a present that contained socks, mittens, underwear or any educational toy, they were flung over our shoulders. 

Sometimes, in our manic craze, we would grab a present from a nearby sib’s pile and open it. This resulted in Christmas-spirited fist fights. We didn’t care. We had a whole year ahead of us to be good and make up for it.

After the unwrapping, we scanned each other’s toy piles to see who had more or less than the others. That’s how you tell how much your parents love you, but the size of your pile, right?

We were so overjoyed with our new toys, we often forgot about a second treasure trove of joy: stockings hanging from the chimney with care. My stocking always bulged with a favorite present: A Life Saver display box that opened like a book and boasted 12 rolls of the sweet candy rings (Butter rum is my fav). 

As an adult, I still get excited about Christmas morning, but the real joy comes in watching kids and grandkids rip into their presents. As I age, I realize that kids have one big advantage over adults. When kids open presents, they don’t like they can remark “This sucks!” or “Grandma needs to stop mixing her meds.””

Adults, however, must pretend to like a bad gift by saying, “Ohhhh. Tube socks. Just what I wanted.”

Jim Pfiffer’s humor column is posted every Sunday on the Jim Pfiffer Facebook page, Hidden Landmarks TV Facebook page and Twin Tiers Living.com. Jim lives in Elmira with his wife, Shelley, many pets and is a retired humor columnist with the Elmira Star-Gazette newspaper.