Today is the last day of school before Christmas break for the schools, and I know there were a lot of excited kids today as the school classes had their winter celebrations. Yes, you heard me correctly. They can't call them Christmas parties, lest any non-Christian people be offended. They also can't have Halloween parties; instead they have harvest parties. When I was in elementary school we had Christmas parties, and would have fought someone if they dared to call it anything else.
Christmas party day was second only in terms of excitement to the last day of school. The only school work we did was the Friday spelling test; other than that, the teacher would give us pages to color or puzzles to work out. After lunch, the room mothers would come and the partying would begin. A few weeks before Christmas party day, we would all draw names and back in my elementary school days, there was a $2 or $3 limit on the present. But you could get a pretty decent gift for a few bucks. Some kids would get gypped bigtime, and their present would be the dreaded Lifesavers Book, but I always gave and received cool gifts. After passing out the presents and opening them, the room mothers would hand out the good stuff. They'd have homemade cupcakes and cookies (another no-no in the schools today -- the kids have to bring in prepackaged items), soft drinks and other snacks. Everybody would get a clear plastic stocking filled with hard candy, and our teacher would usually give us a pen or pencil shaped like a candy cane. We'd play games, and the teacher would get a record player from the audio-visual department and play Christmas records. A good time was always had by all.
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