Who stole Christmas?

 It was the late 90's I think and my girls would have been about 6 and 4 or close to that. It had been a good year so we went a little overboard on Christmas that year and I'm guessing every parent had done that at least once in your kids growing up.

We had lots of presents wrapped under the tree for family and friends so that we would make the rounds Christmas day to deliver presents and visit and eat. 

There were probably 40 or so wrapped presents and Santa had not showed up yet. We had a hard time getting the girls to go to bed. It took 2 cups of hot chocolate and 3 stories and giving in and letting each girl open 1 present each.

My wife at the time picked the presents and strangely enough the girls got new pajamas, red flannel I seem to remember.

Anyway it was close to midnight before they got to sleep, early on we considered Benadryl but decided against it.

It was cold and I had to go to the storage shed so Santa could make an appearance. Like I said it had been a good year and we bought WAY too much stuff. Not thinking straight there was still stuff to put together also. To make a LONG story a little shorter we got to bed about 4:00AM. We had the alarm set for 6:30 thinking we would still be up before the girls. My wife got up to start the coffee and I'm sitting on the edge of the bed when I heard it...An ear piercing scream from the living room. I'm thinking a bear got into the house or Charles Manson had escaped and was holding my wife at knife point but it was worse than either of those. As I made the corner at full speed into the living room my wife yelled "We've been robbed" and standing there before me was a very well lit fully decorated tree with nothing underneath it. EVERYTHING was gone, the Grinch himself could not have been more complete. Still thinking we had been robbed we rushed to make sure the girls were okay. We got to their bedroom and we had a hard time getting the door open but once we got in there was a sight to behold. There were boxes and paper and ribbon and bows and more boxes and toys and clothes and more paper EVERYWHERE with 2 little girls right in the middle of it sound asleep. 

They opened EVERYTHING and took it out of the box. Their stuff...Our stuff...And everybody else's stuff. I started laughing but not my wife, she found zero humor in it...Well we did get everything back in their original boxes I think and everything else went as planned for the day...Truly a Christmas to remember.