Good for them! That teaches responsibility at a very young age. Young kids have a way of rising to the expectations that get set...as do most adults.
I was just thinking of the Christmas that my sister-in-law got snockered and fell off the front porch trying to get my nephew's "Wonder Horse" into the house one Christmas Eve. That was golden.
I remember the Christmas I found out that Santa did not exist. I was about 5 years old and snucked halfway down the stairs on Christmas Eve only to witness one of my parents putting a wagon for me under the tree. I got up the next morning and the tag said "From: Santa." No, it wasn't.
I recall my father getting on a skateboard one of us got for Christmas. The thing shot out from under him, and I swear he hovered in the air parallel to the ground Fred Flintstone style till the count of 3, then gravity won and he fell to the ground flat on his back.
Chocolate Covered Cherries are super, but, not so much for a Diabetic II. We got a package of Nabisco Pinwheels for Christmas, but eating so, so slowly. I remember, at the old farm in Indiana, we had a bowl of nuts with a cracker. I loved the walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds.
I buy a pack of whole nuts every year. I cannot find chestnuts this year...for some reason none of the stores have them this year. I like to roast them in my wood stove.
I remember the bowl of nuts that had to be shelled. The metal "cracker" and those matching picks; I wonder what happened to those. We had a pecan grove on the farm so always plenty of pecans. "Roasted" pecans today my grandpa called "parched."
I remember the 'popcorn balls.' Oh so yummy the combination of sweet and salty. My grandma made them. I also remember the bowl of nuts and the nutcracker. It wasn't an easy tool to use so we would find a big rock or a hammer and smash them.. And those chocolate covered cherries, slurp, slurp. What about those wavy hard candies? Ooo la la.
I have a "dimple" over my left eye from the Christmas afternoon that the boy next door shot me with his BB rifle. It was my fault, really. I ran home screaming with blood trickling into my eye and down my face, my mother had a fit, and my dad just said "only you......", dug the bb out and gave me a tetanus shot. Poor kid next door.....he lost the use of his Christmas rifle for a month. He didn't talk to me for weeks.
Years ago there was a girl attending the nearby college who waitressed at the Ruby Tuesday's I'd dine at. She was from the county I live in now (and which I had never heard of at the time.) She told me that she and her brother would get into BB gun fights until "we both looked like we had the measles."
At some point, we picked up a life-sized manger set that were appliques glued onto plywood, and the figures were then sawn out. This included the livestock and wise men's camels. We had lighted choir angels above it tacked to the second story of the house. The manger was lit with a floodlight that had a blue bulb in it, which might have been a questionable choice. My friends knew my house by the blue camels in the front yard.
One of my very best Christmas memories was a very, very old little church music box. My grandmother came over from Germany around 1901, and she brought the little church with her, and who knows how old it was when she came over with it. The music box could be wound up and it played Silent Night, but not in any version that I had ever heard. It played it way too fast, but I could kind of pick out the melody, even so. My mom put it out on the top of the buffet, along with a small nativity set. the church had a small bulb, like fro a Christmas tree set of lights, and it perfectly lit up the church windows. After I grew up, my children enjoyed it each year, and it is now in Idaho at my oldest son’s house. This is an old photograph, so it is kind of fuzzy, but you can see what it looked like. It was probably a little over 12” talk at the top of the steeple. It had some kind of sparkly stuff on it that was kind of like fish scales (but probably wasn’t), which eventually wore off and my mom put some kind of sparkly stuff on it that has stayed on all of these years.