Horrible Holidays

 It was the 25th of December on a cold, yet beautiful winter morning in 2009. The time was about 6:30 in the morning, I had woken up early to run into my older brothers room and yell, "Wake up! Wake up! Santa came!." My brother and I would then run into my parents' room and insist on going downstairs to open the presents we believed were going to be magical, little did we know, they would be more horrid than magical. As we made our descent down the beautifully lit, garland covered rails my brother and I gazed at our magical looking, live Christmas tree in amazement. "Wow! Look at how many presents there are!" As you could tell, I was really excited for opening presents. Before this Christmas I didn't understand or appreciate how much my parents had done for my brother and I so they decided to pull a trick and surprise us, We didn't know it yet, but there would be no Christmas presents in the Cox household this year. As I ran over to the presents beneath my Christmas tree I hurriedly ripped off the snowman wrapping paper to a solid brown packaging box with a piece of paper inside of it. I picked up the paper and read the words, "This is the gift of appreciation." Being a third grader at the age of nine I did not understand why my parents would do this to me, "Where's the presents?" "Are you hiding them?" "This isn't funny!" were the puzzling statements I was yelling at my parents. My brother being in sixth grade was having an easier time grasping onto the concept of no gifts but, he understood that my parents, "Santa Claus", wanted to show us that we need to be more appreciative of what our parents and Santa himself were getting for us. Ever since that day I have been appreciative and kind towards my parents. At nine years old that was a horrible Christmas gift to me but, now that I think about it at age 14 I realize that if they had never tricked us that Christmas morning, we wouldn't be who we are right now and in my opinion that was the best present I had ever gotten.