The Christmas holidays are so grand. People are milling around, hurrying to get their shopping finished. The neighborhood is lit up with bright Christmas lights, there are twinkling reindeer on the front lawn, and red and green Santa’s on the roof. Mothers are busy in the kitchen preparing those sweet holiday goodies and the smell of hot butter rum wafts through the air. There standing tall and proud is the wonderful tree with all its holiday ribbons, shiny ornaments, little twinkling lights, and below, all the colorfully wrapped presents.
As you look back and take it all in, you realize everything is so perfect…well, almost. Now you add in the children and the holiday is complete. However, there is one small problem. Every time you turn your back, you hear paper rattling and little whispers. Peeking around the corner, you see little hands lifting, peeling back paper, shaking, sniffing, anything to get a hint of what s inside the package.
The holidays make everyone a little hyperactive and crazy but for the children everything is more than they can handle. What starts out as a nicely decorated room with everything in place is soon an array of scattered packages and a few ornaments rolling across the floor. You keep thinking that there has to be something you can do, some way to keep the holidays in order without constantly getting onto the kids. You realize they are stressed already and you don’t want to be another stressful factor. The great news is that there is a solution.
Each year, choose a specific color of bow for each child. Let us say for example you have three children, one 10, one eight, and one six. The first Christmas you start this, you choose the color red for your oldest child, gold for your middle child, and white for your youngest child. Here is the great thing – they have no idea who has what color bow. The key is that each year the child’s bow color changes. The outcome is the children have no idea what packages belong to them, which makes all the shaking, poking, and sniffing not much of a challenge.
The first year they may try to solve the puzzle a couple of times but soon they will give up and by the second year, they will completely be out of the packages. This little tip teaches your child to be patient. As wonderful as the holidays are, they also tend to bring out the greed in all of us, which is perfectly normal, especially for children.
By keeping the kids out from underneath the Christmas tree, they can learn to enjoy other important things about the holiday as well as how to be patient, yet stay exciting for the big day. When children learn how to control their actions, it provides them with a sense of accomplishment. While they may grumble a little at first, they will learn something valuable.