Christmas Eve Time Wastes

From today's "Baby Blues" comic strip:

courtesy King Features Syndicate

I don't know about you guys, but when I was a kid, Christmas Eve was definitely a slow day.

We'd wake up somewhat early and have a whole day to kill before the gift exchange with my dad's side of the family. That was a big Southern get-together where my grandmother made the main dishes and everybody else brought side dishes. My mom spent the early afternoon making deviled eggs. About 3 dozen, cut in half, so there were 72 of those bad boys. My grandmother always had a chaotic house full of people.

Anyway, I only remember one year where we did anything to pass the time...and I went to go see Star Wars. The first one...which is actually the 4th one. I think. I remember being underwhelmed then even though I was 11 and it had been out all summer. I think the hype brought me in with big expectations...and I still remain underwhelmed, frankly.

Other than that, it was tough to get up early and try to kill time until 6PM when we left for my grandmother's.

Once I got married and had kids, we did Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day with Tracy's. This worked well as we'd just open presents at around 2PM or so. What was great was that my higher-order life-liver sister Jilly would open gifts and then she and Tracy would go and make exchanges right then and there...making sure to get home by 6PM. My mother, Charlotte the Scar, was notorious for a couple of Christmas traditions: Stockings filled with toiletries and gifts in the wrong size/style/color. We viewed them as glorified gift certificates.

Once we moved to Dallas and our girls were the ones having to kill time, we'd hit Grapevine Mills Mall because there were often some last-minute things we needed to get, a fantastic Santa to get their photo made with (my favorite story is that my daughters had somehow figured out that if the Santa had pointy ears it was on elf representing Santa, but if the Santa had "normal" ears then it was, in fact, the real one. I have no idea where they developed this theory.), and we'd splurge on Rainforest Cafe--perfect for kids with all the animals & volume & commotion. Yes. We did indeed get a "volcano" dessert every single time. How can you beat sparklers and ice cream and bunch of college kids bringing it enthusiastically yelling "volcanoooooooooooooooowwwww?!"

And, since I have the added occupational hazard of working that night at Christmas Eve services, we'd usually get out of there a couple of hours before the service I'd be doing the teaching in and get ready for that.

So, we've been better with our kids passing the time of this day than ours were with us...

...so what have you experienced or done to help the day speed up?

And, don't think I didn't notice that I just killed 20 minutes by showing up at The Diner today.