205 - When other people touch your Christmas gifts without asking

First of all, Merry Christmas, my Blogger friends. It's coming to the end of the year, and it's good to know that I was actually capable of fulfilling one whole year of blogging. Even though the posts became a bit spread out over the summer, I'm grateful of it nonetheless, and I'm sure I will look back on this one day and be really proud and happy to read what I wrote and what you said in return.

I'm not sure when all of you open up your presents, but do tell. I opened mine today and was quite pleased with the results.

The amount of gifts you generally receive over Christmastime as you get older begins at a high plot on the graph, and gradually becomes a downward-sloping curve, until some time around adolescence where it basically just becomes a flat line, lingering around three to seven presents 'til the day you die. I remember when I was just eight years old, and I got around four times the number my mother received. Oh, to be a child again...

I remember one of my gifts that Christmas was a Pikachu watch, and I was so elated that I wanted to try it on immediately. For some reason the watch wouldn't switch on, so I searched in the box for the manual. And that's when my grandmother decided to snatch the manual and the watch from my hands. I got so angry at her, I nabbed it back, shouted at her for not letting me do it by myself, stomped on her foot, and ran out of the house.

I was extremely bad-tempered as a kid. Eight-year-olds - not the nicest people in the world. (I nod to my family in Gravesend.) But I guess I'll talk about eight-year-olds some other day (like when I have my own?).

It is rude and infuriating when someone takes something of yours without asking, though. Especially something like a Christmas present that's still new and being examined. With my relatives that I'm staying with here in England, everybody is fairly well-mannered, asking if that toy could be played with, or if that book could be taken to have a look at. That's the right way to do things.

At the time, I thought my grandmother was just jealous of the number of presents I got (which she probably was a little because she just got two from the whole family). But she was just trying to help, of course. But there's a way to go about things. You don't snatch people's presents away from them without asking. 

And you also don't go about stomping on grandma's feet.