Changing the names to protect the (in)nocent?

Christmas at our house was pretty much an orgy of excess from the time the better-heeled grandmother discovered Toys R Us until the divorce, at which time it pretty much crashed for the kids and me into our best hope to be able to come up with any gifts for each other at all.

That first year, we stubbornly put up the tree and draped it in Christmas memories, nestling the few small gifts we could afford easily within the rim of its smallish round skirt. The kids spent Christmas Eve exchanging gifts with their dad's side of the family, pretty much coming home with washtubs of gifts that were more useful than special, but much appreciated in our tight times nonetheless.

The kids were eager to have time with their dad's family, but they insisted Christmas morning was time for their Santa at home and for exchanging gifts with me. I have always loved that.

At first, I tried to keep traditions as much in place as possible, pulling out what I could by way of gift wrap and bows, but I couldn't just let the tree skirt sit bare until Christmas morning, so I developed a code to identify the gifts. That way, the kids could look and shake and try to guess what was in the packages, but they didn't know whose was whose, which I assumed sort of added to the challenge.

Sometimes the code was as simple as a string of random numbers so that their birth order appeared as one of the digits (only gifts for Number One son had a 1in them, only those for Second Son had a 2, and Darling Daughter had a 3); sometimes it included their birth year, sometimes it had an initial.

Since this year I have a blog they don't know about and I use names that aren't theirs, I just used the "blog" initials: NO, SS, and DD. I wound up wrapping gifts they were giving each other, so I tacked the giver's real initial on the end, so SSM meant a gift to Second Son from me.

Maybe as early as that first Christmas I managed to scramble the code so that even I didn't remember it, so something of NO's wound up going to Darling Daughter, and something of hers wound up going to SS.  This year, even with what I thought was the easiest code ever, I inverted a couple of them so the givers wound up getting back the gifts they were giving because I put the wrong initials first, but they just slipped them back into the wrappings and sent them on their way.


Although I think all three of the kids have enjoyed trying to figure out the code, DD has typically been the one whose interest in the code has sometimes superseded her interest in the gifts. This year, thee last gifts under the tree were pet toys for the dogs, so they were the first ones out. Since I had used the dogs' real initials, DD thought she had it figured out: first initial the receiver, last initial the giver.

The next gift up was for NO from me, so when he read the code, I interpreted. The next one up was for SS from me, so DD piped up right away with her interpretation: Soldier Son! Since he's shipping out for basic training on a 6-year Army hitch, that's appropriate, but since I haven't told her about the blog yet, I didn't indicate that her assumption was wrong.

After a couple more for SS, NO found one for DD.

"Dramatic Daughter," she interpreted.

"Ah," NO reasoned, "then mine must be 'Not a Mechanic.'" The fact that NOM wouldn't likely stand for that and that a couple of later gifts would come up with his siblings' initials instead of the M didn't seem to faze him.

But his thinking in terms of jobs—SS is off to be a soldier here in a couple of days, and DD holds a degree in theater arts—makes sense. SS is bunking here for a while to work on a degree and career change so he'll really be "not a mechanic."

None of the kids questioned why the NO didn't work (they wound up happier than I had expected with my off-the-wall assortment of gifts), and I didn't volunteer it. But Soldier Son alleviates my concern about having a kid in second place, and DD really can be something of a drama queen. I'm not sure where I'll go with the third one, but I think I've backtracked from existing initials to a whole new set of names!