Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 1015
Reading Target: 30 books
I'm pretty sure that I've already blogged about how our family has never been one for the traditional Filipino noche buena practice. We certainly have Christmas dinner, but we'd wrap up all activities well before midnight to ensure that all kids would be in bed before Santa would start making his rounds. And we've sort of stuck to that practice over the years, all the more so now with younger children in the mix.
Today is Christmas Eve, but it's never a good idea to get kids overly excited about Christmas gifts after dinnertime. And with me leaving for Manila tomorrow afternoon, the practical alternative was to open presents for the kids this morning, and then we'd exchange gifts for the rest of the family after dinner as usual. Thus we created an early Christmas morning experience for the boys and they had a heck of a time trying to figure out which toy to play with first.
I've barely had a chance to go around this week given how busy work has been, so the family was determined that I leave the house even just for groceries. It was nice enough to go around, but as always the real fun was going back to spend time with the nephews and see what antics they get into. I had a lot of Uncle duties over the past 24 hours including assembling some rather complex Christmas gifts in anticipation of our early opening of presents. Then in the afternoon, I got into the water to act as a springboard for some swimming pool play.
There was tough competition on the gift-giving front, but I think my presents for the boys fared well enough. I had some fun stuff for the family as well, although I left my gift for Mom back at the Sietch, which is a bit of a bummer. So I had to fall back on our family tradition of showing a photo of the gift given it wasn't yet available. I'll just rectify things once we're all back in Manila.
Now I need to pack my stuff and get a little sleep before the early drive from Malaysia to Singapore and then the flight home. I'm assuming that I'll be pretty early and might finally have time to explore Jewel before my flight. We'll see how things go.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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