How to Slow the Unwrapping Rush

 When Jan Thatcher Adams was growing up in Sioux City, Iowa, cash was tight and Christmas gifts were few. But that didn’t dim the holiday spirit. Adams’ mother, Mildred Helen Lyman Thatcher, was the anti-Grinch.

“She didn’t have a lot of money, but she used everything she had to make it an unbelievably rich holiday season for us,” Adams says.

The stack of presents was short during those post-World War II years, but Thatcher made sure it was lovely. The resourceful mother of four saved bits of fabric, ribbon and lace from sewing projects to embellish the boxes. She snipped eye-catching photos from magazines. For Thatcher, who worked evenings as a medical secretary, a gift was never just ribbon and wrapping paper.

But the real treat came with the tags. In order to lengthen the opening of gifts on Christmas Eve, each package was labeled with a poem hinting at its contents. The clues were in haiku or rhyming verse and the recipient had to guess what the box contained.

“The guesses could be hilarious and ridiculous, or spot on,” says Adams, who now has two grown sons of her own.

Adams remembers the year her mother gave her father a watch, but wrapped the gift in six separate boxes, creating a Christmas twist on the idea of Russian stacking dolls. Each box had a clue, but her father didn’t solve the mystery until the final poem.

“It was always a time of much laughter,” Adams says. “The gift didn’t really matter. We would have laughed and had a lot of fun before they’d even opened it.”

Adams now lives in Shakopee, Minnesota, and her mother passed away more than a decade ago. She remembers visiting another family for the holidays following her mother’s death. She was stunned by their gift exchange.

“It was like the light turned green and everyone ripped open their packages,” she says. “In five minutes it was done.”

While members of Adams’ family are now spread from coast to coast and don’t always gather together for Christmas, when they do they’ve kept the ritual of guessing before opening presents. Adams, a family doctor, says she’s not a skilled poet, so the guess is based on the size, shape and weight of the box.

Last year, one of her sons and his family came for the holidays. Her 7-year-old grandson “was used to tearing into everything,” she says. So they appointed him Santa Claus and he passed out the gifts to everyone. Once he caught on to the guessing game, she says, “he really had a great time.”

Adams was delighted to share the tradition with a boy who was Thatcher’s great-grandson. “The magic still works,” she says.

Be the anti-Grinch:

- Make gift-giving a slower, more thoughtful ritual by opening presents one at a time, maybe going from oldest to youngest or by alphabetical order of names.

- Require gift receivers to guess what they’re getting. Note: Wrapping presents in weighted, oddly shaped boxes adds to the fun.

-  Provide poems or other clues to hint at what’s inside each box.

- Use creative wrapping paper, such as finger-painted inside-out grocery bags. Or decorate boxes with magazine photos.
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