When Does Christmas Start in Your House?

My almost 4-year-old daughter scared the heck out of me in the wee hours of Friday morning. At around 4:30 a.m., she padded down the hall from her bedroom to ours, Sheriff Woody clutched in her hands for company, and suddenly materialized by my side of the bed (why is it that children always go to mom’s side of the bed for these off-hour visits?).

I don’t know how long she was standing there watching us sleep – she didn’t make a sound until she accidentally knocked my hardcover copy of Charlaine Harris’s Dead in the Family off the nightstand and onto the carpet with a thump. I bolted up from under the covers and exclaimed “Lucy!” when I saw her tangled mop of blonde hair by my bedside. She couldn’t explain why she was there, just that she had woken up and came looking for me in the dark, more than an hour before my alarm was set to go off. A trip to the bathroom and a Dixie cup of cold water later, she was back in bed and so was I.

But somehow I know that this isn’t the last pre-dawn encounter we Lunday girls will have this weekend, given that Sunday is Christmas Day. Lucy has been asking me “Is it Christmas today?” when I’ve gone to her bedroom to get her up every morning for about two weeks now. When the big day finally arrives, there’s going to be no stopping her from first running into our room and blatting loudly that it’s Christmas before flying down the stairs to see what Santa brought her.

Christmas is all about the kids having fun, and I don’t want to spoil her good time. And yet, my husband and I are not keen on getting up at a wildly unreasonable hour to indulge her. There’s just not enough coffee in the world to brace myself for unwrapping presents with Lucy and her little brother before, say, 6 a.m.

Does that make me a Scrooge? Is it Grinchy of me that I’m planning to send

Lucy back to bed if she comes barreling into our room at 4:30 a.m. Christmas morning? Parents, when does your yuletide alarm clock go off? What time crosses the line when it comes to early rising? If your children appear in your room before 6 a.m., will you threaten stockings full of coal if they don’t go back to bed until a more reasonable hour?