Christmas morning
Posted in Perhaps the best Christmas song from a non-Christmas album is You Gotta Get Up (Christmas Morning)>”You Gotta Get Up” by Rich Mullins. It perfectly captures that moment when a child wakes up on Christmas morning, but there’s a line that I now understand a whole lot better.
Mom and Dad stayed up too late last night
I guess they got carried away in the Christmas candlelight
You’ve gotta get up, you’ve gotta get up, you’ve gotta get up
It’s Christmas morning.
As the kids get older these lines make more sense. Christmas is a lot of work for parents, especially for procrastinators like us. This was my first year putting together a bike (Ok, so it was actually a Big Wheel, but to the boys it’s a bike) for Christmas. Between that and some touch-up work I did on another “new” toy, my garage felt like a northern workshop. Meanwhile, our guest room looked like a bunch of elves invaded it since my wife wrapped all of the presents for the kids. We got very little sleep the two nights before Christmas, but it was all worth it that morning. The four year old got up first, and we let him wake up his little brother. The look on his face when he saw the room full of presents was worth every minute of missed sleep.
Of course they loved opening the presents. And they stopped to play with each one as it was opened. We actually took a couple of breaks so we could eat. You know there are a lot of presents when you take two breaks!
There’s a large part of me that wishes Christmas as we know it would go away. The pressure to find the right present is high, the money spent is ridiculous, and kids know they’re the center of attention to the point that they are nearly unbearable. But despite all of that, the moments of magic when the boys walk downstairs are worth it all.
