Does Santa Wrap His Gifts or Not?

Does he or doesn't he? This is a yearly debate between G and I. At his house, Santa's presents were always wrapped and tagged (written in handwriting eerily smiliar to G's mom's...and G still believed until about 25 years old). At my house, Santa came in and dumped his bag of unwrapped gifts around the tree. It was understood that Santa was way too busy to wrap all his gifts, and that's how we could tell what was from Santa and what was from Mom and Dad. It saved a lot of time, both Mom's and everyone else's who didn't have to wait for the kids to unwrap every goddamn thing.

So at your house, did/does Santa wrap his gifts to you or not? (G predicts that Santa wraps his gifts 95% of the time - will he be right?).

In other Santa news: I love that we have kids to believe in Santa Claus. I love the whole Santa thing. I remember I figured it out pretty young but pretended for a long time, because I was afraid that if I let on that I knew, the loot would diminish. But c'mon - if Santa has a workshop, why do all the toys come labeled by Mattel? And how come he wraps presents at some houses and not others?

But I digress...my point is that we're expending quite a bit of effort preparing Aidan to meet and talk to Santa Claus without screaming. Not for his benefit, of course, but because we have photos of three previous Santa visits, and I don't intend to miss this one. So we're talking it up big time.

He doesn't watch commercials on TV, so he doesn't know about the tons of toys out there he could ask for. All he wants are James and Edward to add to his Thomas engines. I asked if that would be enough, and he looked at the family room, waved his arm and said, "We have lots of toys." So I suggested maybe Santa could bring some clothes, and he agreed. How cool is that?

I love this age.