Minimize the chaos of opening presents
Your cat just made a brave and unsuccessful attempt at climbing the Christmas tree. In the excitement of all that your spouse just stepped on two presents under the tree.
That, unfortunately, is not a made-up story. Christmas is not all sweet carols and peppermint sticks.
It’s a wonderful time of the year but it’s also a chaotic one. That chaos reaches a peak on Christmas morning (or Christmas Eve if, like in my family, that’s when you open presents). Chaos makes it easier to make mistakes. So — as a public service from the Husted Technology Ranch — I offer you these bits of advice that may make the day a bit more relaxed.
Most are based on ugly personal experience or on emails received by readers. If you pay attention to these tips it’s less likely that you’ll be writing me with your own sad story after the holidays.
You need to start the day with juice
Some of the gifts you open will need batteries and you’ll also need new or charged batteries for your camera. Not having charged batteries can really put a damper on the morning. If you new gadget is opened and there are no batteries for it, half the fun of the morning disappears. If your camera isn’t ready to go you’ll miss out as well. Just try telling people to wait an hour or so before opening their presents while your batteries charge and see how that goes. So have a stock of batteries ready for everything you’ll use.
Avoid the garbage can
My wife likes to clean up as we open presents. She doesn’t wait until it’s over to start filling bags with discarded wrapping and packaging material. That keeps things tidy. But, one year, she cleaned out any chance of using some now long-forgotten gadget. Some of the parts for it were hidden in a piece of cardboard that appeared to be just trash. It wasn’t. And none of that is unusual — I routinely see accessories and parts hidden away in what seems to be ordinary packing material.
So, as you open presents, make sure you check through the packaging material before throwing it away. As the person who spent an hour or so poking through our garbage trying to find the missing parts, I can tell you that activity can rapidly remove the Christmas spirit.
Putting it all together
Some electronic devices require quite a bit of assembly, and a lot of electronic toys come in pieces for you to assemble. The crowded tree area, filled with laughing and talking people, is about the worst place I can imagine for putting something together. It would be easy to get distracted and make a mistake, perhaps even break some part by trying to force it where it doesn’t belong. If you want to put something together immediately, leave the room and find a quiet place to work.
Manual chores
I’ve known many people who discarded a product’s manual along with the trash — and not by mistake either. Some devices seem so simple and intuitive that there seems to be no need for the manual. Even so it’s smart to put the manual and any other documents that offer instructions away. In my house they go into the junk drawer. And I’ll admit that they are seldom needed. But on the few times I did need them, I was glad to be able to paw through that drawer and find them.
Have a fine holiday season, and I hope everything you unwrap pleases you. I also realize — good tips from me or not — that there probably will be some minor glitches when your family opens presents. Just make that part of the fun.