Wishful Wednesday: Holiday Experience

I wish I could relive one particular holiday experience over and over again, and it would be the basketball incident!

When my siblings go to bed on Christmas eve we always say "Whoever wakes up first, wakes up the others." We still do this at 17, 21 and 24 years of age. Typically during my childhood Christmases, my sister or I would get up first then wake up the other one and go down and get our stockings. We would bring the stockings to one of our bedrooms and look at everything, then wake up my brother and take him to get his. Once stockings are done we are allowed to wake up our parents and open presents. We are not supposed to mess with any presents until then.

The year this happened (I was probably 12 or 13 and she was probably 9 or 10) my sister and I went to get the stockings and noticed that there was a stuffed basketball, unwrapped under the tree. There was a note in the "Santa handwriting" addressed to my sister that said "Look inside" taped to it. Even though we had never tried to open presents before we couldn't resist opening the basketball. It just seemed to strange to have a present inside a stuffed "animal."

Or should I say...trying to open the basketball. We looked for a zipper or Velcro to open it and couldn't find anything. We then tried to rip the thing open. Also no luck. We were about to get scissors when we realized that our parents probably would not be happy if they saw we had opened a present.

After looking at our stockings we woke up our parents. Even though at that age we knew the truth about Santa, we always (still do this too) make a big show of what we got from Santa and what is in our stockings. So my sister told my parents about the basketball with a mysterious something inside. I told them we had tried to open it and couldn't.

My mom looked at us like we were crazy and told us to read the note again. In our frenzy we didn't notice that it said "Look outside" not "Look inside." If we had looked outside we would have seen the basketball hoop my sister had been wanting, set up in the driveway.

It's funny how sometimes it's a little thing that you remember. Even though this story is not about my most exciting Christmas or the best gift I ever got, thinking about the two of us in our matching Christmas pajamas trying to rip open a stuffed basketball with our bare hands always makes me laugh!