Have you ever secretly unwrapped a gift before the big day?
Submitted by Red Pen.
When I was just a little thing, I used to think that it was so cool to be able to sneak in and out of places and no one ever knew that I was or had been there. As the perfect cat burglar, I was the queen of finding out what we were getting for Christmas long before Christmas morning.
My parents either weren't the best at hiding presents or they just flat out didn't try to hide them which is more likely considering the other things that they never tried to hide. So every year, the presents were in the back corner of my dad's bedroom closet and every year, on a Sunday night, when my parents were at the bowling alley, the recon mission began.
League play started at 7 and the lanes were about 10 minutes away, therefore my mom and dad left at about 6:30. (I didn't find out until later that there were pre-bowling preparations such as getting coffee/beer/chicken wings/etc. Besides that, my dad was VERY against shoing up on CP time.) For an agonizing 30 minutes, my brother and I sat around the house, just waiting for the clock to strike 7, for the pins to start falling, for the tape to be slowly and carefully peeled back.
At the stroke of 7, we entered the sacred closet. We both took a mental picture of how the presents were placed in the closet so we could return them in the exact same manner. One by one, we would take them out of the closet. My brother, always more excited about Christmas than I was, he always got better gifts, but I digress, would pick out a couple things that he just HAD TO KNOW about what was in the box. With my super steady 11 year old hand, I would carefully peel back the tape without ripping any paper and unwrap the box enough so that we could see the treasure inside. After all was said and done, I would carefully rewrap everything and place it back into the closet. After a while, I had gotten so good at it, that even if I ripped the paper a little, I could put it back exactly where it was and place another piece of tape on top so that it looked like nothing ever happened.
All that practice growing up and nowhere to apply it in the real, grownup world since being a cat burglar might pay the bills, but there's no health insurance. Now that I have a daughter of my own, I don't even put the presents under the tree until Christmas eve and we keep our bedroom door locked. :-)
HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!