"From" & "To"

What I remember first from that year is my brother going back inside the house after Mom had turned to us & said, as she'd said each year prior, "Go ahead & get in the car. I'm going to call Grandma & tell her we're on our way."

Something told me to stay in the car; some force kept me in the car that year even though he'd gone back inside, something he'd never "rebelled" & done in years past.

I'm glad I did.

He'd gone back inside to "help out".

What I'd learn two days later was that Mom & Dad's "routine", those Christmas' before, had been to call Grandma & tell her we were on our way - though that part wrapped up (no pun intended! 😁) really quickly, then to quickly put all of the gifts for us kids & for each other (Mom & Dad, that is) underneath & around the Christmas tree.

As with most everything, my parents gave my brother the explanation one year before they discussed it with me. Even though they let him stay inside (they probably also had him on high alert in case I ended up following suit & coming back inside too) to help arrange everything under & around the tree, they did give me my singular moment where they broke it down for me & explained what "From Santa" meant in our household whenever I'd see it on one of these.

Since that time I've read better versions, though in the grand scheme of things, & knowing my parents' history of "explaining 'life' things", I've got to give them their due cred; they earned it. On this, their method worked well.

It also took our family into a new phase for the next few years; maybe it was just the following year.

Mom wanted to keep the "process" of our family unwrapping our gifts exciting & unknown. It took Dad until many years later to kick in & really help out with wrapping the family gifts...He'd typically only wrap those which he'd picked out for Mom...& on those he'd typically pre-fill out a bunch (these are the type we'd have around to use) with their respective names in the "To" & "From" fields...So there Mom was filling out every name tag.

She decided to get creative. She came up with a system. The system consisted of coding our names when she wrote them down. This way whenever we'd reach for the next gift underneath the tree, we wouldn't instantly know who's gift it was, & therefore elongate & enjoy the gift giving exchange a bit more among those under our roof (grandparents weren't included in this).

Her coding, which I took the longest to decode (because I wasn't really thinking about it!) was to number Dad's gifts "No. 1", "No. 2", "No. 3", etc., in so that his name was effectively the number of the gift she'd wrapped for him. And for each of us kids, a different amount of stars was written in the "To" field. I believe mine had five stars written in the "To" field on the name tag of each gift. Each gift's "From" field read "Mom & Dad" in so that as not to tip off which were Dad's, his therefore technically read that they were "From" him & "To" him, even though incognito.

The idea did work well & it did serve as a great segue between these younger years while we grew into our tween & adolescent years.

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