Christmas Candy Tradition

In yesterday's blog post, I wrote about some of those family traditions of ours that you SHALL NEVER MESS WITH.  I'm sure every family has some of those, and we sure have our fair share.  In fact, in that post I didn't even begin to reveal any of our food traditions.  There are quite a few of those, too.

 
One of our Christmas candy traditions goes way back - it probably started about 25 years ago, to the best of my recollection and calculations.  My SIL, Stephanie, cross-stitched four little treat bags one Christmas for our four children, and as I recall they were filled with candy when they received them.

Every year since then, those treat bags have been filled with various assortments of Christmas candy.

These are some of those things that any guests visiting our home, other than family, will never see, and that is because each year those bags are loaded and hung upstairs on the bedroom doorknobs.

As my four children have grown up and gotten wiser, there have even been specific requests for what gets loaded into those little sacks.  They don't just want M & M's, or hard candies, or tiny candy canes, as before.  Now they want truffles.

You know, those expensive little chocolate balls of ecstasy.

So expense is one problem, just one of the many problems that have developed along with this Christmas candy tradition.

Others are greed, gluttony, and theft.

At times the children become delusional, convinced one bag contains more than another.  (I am careful to divvy them out in exactly equal amounts.  I eat any extras that would make one bag fuller than the others!)

Sometimes overnight one bag becomes empty and another is bulging.

Sometimes the flavors have been rearranged among the bags.

Then there are accusations and suspicions.  Criminals on the lam.

On a rare occasion, an entire bag goes missing.

There's a lot of stealthy stuff going on at times up there in the hallway.  Covert missions.  Skirmishes and ambushes.

Yes, those innocent little GIFT bags at times bring out the most evil nature within my children's hearts.


But then I remember, a very special little child was born one Christmas long ago who would someday deal with all the hearts of evil...  There's the TRUE GIFT, and I'm so thankful.