Hide the Presents

It's time to hide presents at our house. My parents used to hide presents before Christmas, but I always found them. It was rare for me to not know what I was getting well before the big day. The challenge was to find them before they were wrapped - sometimes I could get enough of the tape neatly unstuck to peek inside and see what I had, but that was always dangerous. One tiny little rip could give away the whole covert operation.

In my house, wrapping the presents ahead of time actually causes more of a problem than merely hiding things in plain sight. Our autistic son Jack loves presents, by which I mean he loves opening them. He generally cares little about what's inside, it's the thrill of opening that gets him going. And he is absolutely oblivious to the shame of detection. He'll unwrap a present right in front of you, at high speed, just to get it open before you finish leaping over the furniture in a vain attempt to reach him before he exposes the big surprise you bought for one of the other kids. If it's his present he opens, it's basically "so what?" Just wrap it again and give it to him on christmas morning.

So in our house, if you wrap presents before you hide them, you had better have them under lock and key. And on Christmas morning, assign someone to guard the presents, otherwise Jack will have opened EVERYONE's presents within three minutes of being let into the living room. I can't count the number of times he's opened everything when no one was looking - the first time he did it was before christmas and he opened every single thing under the tree and then we had no idea what belonged to who or where it had come from. That was a mess. That was the last year we put any presents under the tree. Ever since then our tree has been rather lonely looking, as all the beautifully wrapped packages that get delivered immediately get locked up in the back of the closet. So much for pretty wrappings. We also had to stop using tree ornaments that looked like little wrapped packages after he tore all those up as well.