So we opened gifts the other night since Linz and I won’t be together on Christmas (at some point I’ll have to leave my family tradition and we’ll start one of our own). And watching the boy reminded me of the spectacle that is a child unwrapping gifts. Children virtually douse themselves with impatient gasoline sitting next to the tree and when a gift is handed to them it may as well be a road flare, setting them on fire with anticipation as they're rip into the paper, the sum of their imaginative wishes filling the contents of the package. It’s truly a magical event. It does makes some gifts anticlimactic, though. You can see the tension loosen in the wires that hold their excited face when all the paper comes off and it’s not the magic item they failed to will into the box but, say, tube socks. But the hugging is still fun, even though it may just be an exercise to them after gifts like those.