Christmas Morning

Early Christmas Morning Like all kids, none of us could sleep on Christmas Eve. Even with our special holiday Cold Duck cocktail, it was hard to stay in bed till 7 the next morning. Christmas was just too exciting for sleep. Grandma and Grandpa insisted we wait till 7am, when the sun came up. I'm sure it was something like,"If the sun is not up, then neither are you" because that would be easy for kids to grasp..look out the window. Is there light? No? Go to sleep. You didn't need to be able to tell time. Some had tried over the years to sneak an early peek at our presents, but it was nearly impossible to avoid the creaky board outside your grandparent's door. Grandma had super hearing and would yell at us to go to bed as we tiptoed down the hallway. Nobody slept on Christmas eve night. So it was quite unusual that one early Christmas morning, Uncle John woke everybody up yelling, "Wake up! It's time! It's Christmas!" We were all still really tired, and grandma couldn't believe it until she looked at her clock. It said 7am. We all raced into the living room and started attacking the presents. Nothing was wrapped, just had little nametags on it. The 4 of us kids were done dividing and conquering in just a matter of minutes. Grandpa says now that he remembers wondering why the sun wasn't up, but he didn't think much about it. He went into the kitchen to" put on a pot of coffee," my parent's favorite verb.  Everything was fine and filled with the christmas spirit until grandpa turned on the radio. What he heard was something like:     "Good Christmas morning, Chicago! It's a cold, 3am here in the big city...lets's play a little music for you early risers..." 3am? Did the radio say 3am? Grandpa looked out the window. There was no sign of sunrise. There weren’t even any lights in any of the other houses on our block that had kids. He looked at the kitchen clock: 7:15. The clock in the bedroom also read 7:15.  Turns out that Uncle John had fast forwarded all the clocks in the house by four hours. Magically, he got past that squeaky board outside Grandma’s door and got into their bedroom (remember, Grandpa Tolley was a cop). No one knows how he did it, and Uncle John hasn’t given up his secrets.