While I was cooking and baking Christmas breakfast, our son was insistent that we help him find a pair of his “toy” drum sticks. I insisted that he should check under the tree and see if Santa left a long and narrow gift. I told him that if Santa was going to go through all the trouble of getting him a drum, that it would be pretty silly of Santa to not bring him some drum sticks too. Our son searched under the tree but thought that every gift was long and narrow! After I pointed him to the right gift, he quickly ripped off the paper and within seconds was drumming to his little heart’s content (real drums are quite loud). Once we had the eggs, bacon, and coffee ready, we all sat down for part one of Christmas breakfast (part two would be the Christmas Morning Rolls that were baking in the oven).
After the bacon and eggs had been consumed, we gave our son and daughter their stockings. They both seemed to really enjoy pulling all the things out most of which was some form of handcrafted candy and chocolate. In our son’s stocking was one of the two way radios. With my husband’s help our son turned it on and learned how to talk into it. When he heard his voice echo from another part of the house, he was surprised and a little concerned. I helped him track down his eerie voice that was coming from a box with a blue ribbon. Once he had retrieved that matching two way radio, he and daddy started playing with them. Meanwhile, our daughter opened her first gift: a pink convertible made with recycled plastics. She played with it for a split second and was back playing with the things from her stocking.
When the “boys” were ready for a break from the two way radio play, we all sat down and ate our Christmas Morning rolls (a tradition that was started when I was a child) and another cup of coffee! These rolls are not the standard run of the mill sticky bun. These rolls are made with fresh sweetened bread dough and rolled with a mixture of brown sugar, butter, raisins, pecans, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Once they are baked they are topped with a simple homemade icing of heavy cream and powdered sugar. They are beyond delicious and a Christmas tradition!
Over the next two hours the children slowly opened their remaining gifts, stopping to play with each before going back to play with the one they liked the best. For our son it was most certainly the drum and for our daughter it was, oddly, her new tooth brush. My husband and I also exchanged our homemade gifts and were pleasantly surprised and pleased with what the other had made. It was a wonderful and very relaxed Christmas morning!