When do you open Christmas presents? Maine families vary on timing of gifts

If there’s one thing people can agree on about Christmas, it’s that no one agrees when the presents should be opened.

Well, yes, they do.

Everyone would like to open them as soon as possible.

But old traditions die hard – 65 percent of Americans who celebrate the holiday exchange their gifts on Christmas morning, according to a Gallup poll released just in time for the holiday.

Twenty-one percent of Americans open their packages on the night before Christmas and get to sleep in on the holiday.

A lucky 12 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, get to open their presents on both days.

They tend to be more tired than the 65 percent and the 21 percent.

And then there are folks like Frank Roy of Bangor, untracked by Gallup, who open one present on Christmas Eve, then impatiently wait for morning.

“I can’t wait until Christmas Day,” Roy said Wednesday, just hours before being able to open his single Christmas Eve gift.

But there are rules about the one gift. “It can’t be a big one,” Roy said. “It has to be one of the smaller gifts.”

Kristie Billings of Mount Desert still opens her gifts on Christmas morning, just as when she was a girl. That’s just the way it always has been.

“When I was a child, it was the crack of dawn,” she said. “Now it’s a little later.”

Ruth Foster of Ellsworth has two daughters and two grandsons. They open their gifts in the morning. Sort of.

“They peek for days and then open on Christmas morning,” she said of the children – her grown daughters.

Shane Robertson of Sullivan, meanwhile, doesn’t give a hoot when the gifts are open. He’s flexible and easy to get along with – a compromising kind of guy.

“Either way, it doesn’t matter to me. I can sit home and not work,” which is always a great Christmas gift, he said.

Melanie Davis of West Hartford, Conn., and her cousin Tristan Murkette of Enfield, Conn., agreed that family tradition requires them to wait until morning.

“That’s just the way we’ve always done it,” Davis said, laughing as she added, “Not that we wouldn’t beg to open our presents.”

“That’s another tradition,” Murkette said.

For Dick Blaisdel of Bar Harbor, Christmas is a workday.

He wasn’t sure Wednesday when he would open his gifts this year – if at all.

“I can’t think of anyone right offhand that would give me a gift,” he said.