I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. It was still dark out. All except for this soft glow of all different colors coming from the stairway.
Suddenly, I was wide awake! At long last it was Christmas morning! I laid there at first just staring towards the stairs because I knew that no one would be awake yet. And the rule of Christmas morning was that no one could open their presents until Dad was up. And you better not wake Dad up!
But lying there wasn’t good enough. I had to go downstairs and look. The trick was to get down the stairs without waking anyone up. Since the stairs creaked when you stepped on them, it wasn’t always so easy getting down without being heard… but, it wasn’t impossible.
I woke my younger sister up. Every year she always made me promise to wake her up if I woke up before she did. And every year, like clockwork, I would wake up at almost the same time. I could almost tell you the time without looking at the clock. It was anywhere between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning.
My sister and I as quiet as possible, snuck downstairs. She always followed me because I always remembered where to step on each stair to prevent it from creaking. We did a lot of shushing and inward giggling every time there was the slightest bit of noise. But we finally made it.
There it was! Across the living room from where we stood. The most perfectly formed and decorated tree ever! With the fragrant smell of pine throughout the whole house, the lights were all big and colorful and solid. They didn’t blink like the newer kinds do. The tinsel hung straight and glittered reflections of all the different colored lights. The slightest movement would cause the tinsel to flutter ever so gently, causing all the colored shadows on the walls to dance around. The ornaments were all different sizes, colors, and shapes. Never two of the same together.
My sister and I just stood there in the middle of the room staring. Every year it was the same. No matter how excited we were the night before about opening presents, we always studied the tree first and we always ended up looking at the angel on top last. The quiet and peacefulness of the early morning always made us think of what this day really stood for.
Then we would both sit down on the floor and pull our knees up to our chins, wrapping our arms around our legs and then, that’s when we would look at all the presents under the tree.
The magical childlike wonderment of those early morning hours will stay with me forever.