Keith: Now, back to opening presents in the morning-did your parents torture you like mine used to?
Jill: You had to wait until they got up?
Keith: No, no, no, we had to have breakfast first. Mom would prepare the biggest, most elaborate breakfast on the face of the Earth, and then my mother, who never served my father coffee, would say, "Dave, would you like another cup of coffee?" and my dad would say, "Yeah, I think that would be a good idea." They were both never people who refrained from drinking coffee or anything in the living room, but on Christmas morning, "Oh, no, no. We can't drink coffee in the living room, we must finish our coffee at the breakfast table." So they tortured us kids for as long as humanly possible. That's where their Christmas joy came from, is watching us squirm. David: You have any specific Christmas memory that perverse or wonderful?
Jill: All my Christmases have been wonderful, and just way too many gifts, and I think the hardest part was waking up early and trying to get your parents to get out of bed so that you could open them right now, because we weren't allowed to start opening until our parents were down there as well. I always just-my stocking was always my favorite part of Christmas, so that's what we wanted to open first, so we would get away with bringing it upstairs if they wouldn't get out of bed, and opening it upstairs. So at least we got to get started that way, but I don't remember any particularly torturous happenings from my parents. I guess they were just pretty normal, unlike yours, Keith.
David: For me, when I was growing up, it was always the same thing. I had a younger sister, three and a half years younger than myself, so my sister would wake up before me. She'd wake me up and say, "David, David, it's Christmas," and we'd put on our PJs and we would run downstairs and it was surprising. It was magical at that time. We were allowed to open our stockings, but we had to wait for our parents to wake up, so we could open our stockings and take everything out, and open that. My sister and I got a bit older, we became a bit more materialistic, so what we would do is we would-our parents would always ask us for a Christmas list, sort of a basis on which they can buy presents. So what we would do is we would use-we didn't have computers back then in the eighties, so we had carbon paper. So what we would do is write down our Christmas list, and there would be another copy of it, so we'd give one to our parents, and we'd keep one. Then, when Christmas came around, we'd sit down, and as we opened our presents, we'd like check off each one as we got it. And, of course, there'd be a row if it wasn't fulfilled properly. No, we didn't do that, but one thing that we'd do every Christmas-my father does this every Christmas-there is a movie called A Christmas Story, and Peter Billingsley, who plays the kid in the movie A Christmas Story, wants a BB rifle, a Red Ryder BB rifle for Christmas. Of course, in the movie-it's a wonderful movie, it's become a contemporary classic, it was made in the early eighties and it's now a classic. Not to be confused with A Wonderful Life, which is also a wonderful movie. In the movie, the boy wants this BB gun, and of course, his parents have everything against it, and he opens up all his presents, and of course, he gets the socks, and he gets this ridiculous bunny outfit that his aunt or grandma sends him, and at the end, he thinks it's all finished, and the parents or the father says, "What is that thing over there, behind the table over there?" So he runs over and of course, it's the BB gun. He's very happy. So, every Christmas, every Christmas, my dad says the same thing. He hides one of the presents, and he says, when we're all finished, "David, what is that over there? I can't-is that something else?" He always hides one, he does that. It's kind of cute.
