My challenge was to come up with a presentation for this "special gift from Santa" ... and I only found out about the parameters of this project yesterday evening ... The Wife had picked up a toy plane (but a fighter, not an airliner) and a Mickey Mouse toy, and handed those to me saying "do something wth these". So, I go off a-Googling and find a nice picture of a Ted plane, Disney World, and the hotel (the "Pop Century" resort, the newest of the low-cost on-property hotels), found some nice Santa clip-art, and did up a note "From the Desk of Santa Claus", as seen here. I then put that in the bottom of a grey stationary box, fit the two toys (referenced in the letter) in there, taped it up so it would stay closed, wrapped it and got it under the tree.
This took me to nearly 3am ... so I was (naturally enough) not particularly enthused when Daughter #2 decided that 6am (in total darkness) was long enough to wait to get into the prizes. It is funny to see the differences between The Girls, #2 is a blur of flying paper, grabbing any box/package that even remotely looks like it might have her name on it (at 5, she's still not really reading), while #1 likes to open things up and sort of meditate on the contents, spending long minutes contemplating the decorations on a dress, etc. This of course leads to conflict eventually as #2 comes up for air and sees that her older sister still has lots of packages ... which is no doubt due to her having MORE (as opposed to having a more leisurely pace).
Oh, and in case you were wondering ... the "letter from Santa" was a HUGE hit, made "more authentic" by it referencing things mentioned by Daughter #1 in a note she'd left for Santa out with the cookies and milk. Everybody's excited about the trip, and nobody seems to feel "cheated" that this is in lieu of more packages under the tree! We leave a week from today, so there's a lot of anticipation building up.
Somewhere around 8am everything had been opened, and The Girls were off playing with stuff, and I took the opportunity to crawl back into bed! The Wife began fielding and/or making the obligatory family phone calls, and I was able to get another couple of hours of sleep to go with the 3 I'd gotten over night.
It looks like an icky rainy/snowy day outside so our options of "fun stuff to do" (uh, before the BEARS game at 4pm) were limited, so it looks like we're going off to see The Chronic (Les of Narnia) in an hour or so here.
More, no doubt, later ...