The rule in our house was parents didn't get up until 8am on Christmas morning. My siblings and I were usually up around 6. We got to open our stockings and play with the unopened Santa gift. We still do it when we're all home for Christmas.

For us it was 7am, though no one was allowed to open anything until my parents and all the siblings were there. My sister used to wake up at the crack of dawn and bounce around the house until it woke my mother up. My brother usually got up and around 6. At 7am my mother would start trying to get my father and I out of bed. It was a tossup which one of us would be the last one to finally drag our butts into the living room at 7:45, at which point my sister was nearly insane with anticipation.

Yes, there were parental and sibling and long-lost relative in Hawaii gifts already under the tree. And then on Christmas Day, the Santa gifts would arrive.

Which is another reason why I don't think I'd sell Santa to my kids; I couldn't afford it!

So, for people that grew up with Santa... were there presents under the tree before Christmas day? Did parents get presents? Did you get presents for siblings?

We had presents under the tree from our parents. My parents had presents for each other under the tree (well, my mother's gifts to my dad were there. Since my dad always waited until the absolute last minute to shop for my mom, her presents didn't show up there until Christmas morning), and once we got old enough, we siblings would get each other gifts as well. The presents to other family members who we would be seeing Christmas Eve and Christmas day also waited under the tree until they were packed into the car to go.

The Santa gifts, specially labled and wrapped, didn't get put out until sometime after all the kids had gone to bed the night before.

I grew up with "There is no Santa, but it's not nice to tell Christian kids that." I only broke that rule once -- a boy asked me what Santa was bringing me, and I said "nothing," and he told me that I must have been really bad if Santa wasn't bringing me anything, and started listing bad things I might have done. So I told him there was no Santa, and convinced him. He cried. (This was second grade.)

My mother said that one of the things that our fourth-grade teacher said, in a discussion about how my class was the worst class that any teacher could remember, was that, as an example of how immature we, collectively, were, she'd never seen so many fourth-graders who still believed in Santa.

Ah! In our house, the only presents under the tree prior to Christmas morning were the gifts from the siblings to our parents and from sibling to sibling.

Oh yeah, Santa still fills the stockings at my parents' house. Except now I usually add stuff too. So, my dad fills them at night, and I sneak a thing or two in, when I go to bring them into my parents' bedroom where we open them.

When my sister and I were about 10 and 13, my mother started putting up a stocking on Christmas Eve and filling it with candy and little presents to herself after we'd gone to bed. When she was growing up, her family didn't have a tree or big presents on Christmas, but they did hang stockings. She didn't want to do that when we were little, but she missed it and decided that we were old enough to not get too confused at that point. She offered to let us hang stockings, too (though my father reacted to that with a "no they are not,"), but we both said no. (We got most of the candy from hers anyway.)

We didn't have a Christmas tree in Jamaica. My mother said that was a cold-weather western thing. I think our Jamaica house was the only place I lived with a pine tree in the front yard, but my mother didn't care.

Christmas morning two bags of (unwrapped) gifts arrived. In the house they still live in, my sister had one chair and I had another, and that was it.

I think delayed treeing made my sister (and eventually) my mother decorating Nazis. I never really cared. I'm really lazy.

My mom stopped doing stocking stuffers a couple years ago. There was much wailing and nashing of teeth from my siblings and I on that, even though our stocking stuffers were just silly things like pens, cards and candy.

Since my dad always waited until the absolute last minute to shop for my mom, her presents didn't show up there until Christmas morning

I think this is why I was a tad confused about the Santa issue early on. Because my Dad did his shopping on the day before Christmas, he put presents under the tree Christmas Eve by default. My mom, on the other hand, made a game of putting a new present under the tree every day in the weeks before Christmas, so that we would rush home to see who it was for, try to guess what it might be, etc.