Since my family did this ….

Since my family did this every Christmas through the years, I decided to look up the phrase “Christmas Gift” in Wikipedia. It said, “The tradition of saying ‘Christmas Gift’ can be traced back as early as 1844 in the southern United States.” It further said that it was commonly used among poor Anglo farming families in rural areas, when people would wake on Christmas morning and rush to say “Christmas Gift” before anyone else. (This “gift” was usually not really expected.) In my own family, my maternal grandparents were both born in the 1890s to parents who were farmers in the southern state of Arkansas. My grandparents passed this tradition on to their descendants, and now, in December 2020, despite the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, I’ll be expecting someone in my family to call and say, “Christmas Gift, Ethel”—unless I beat them to it. Ha!