Ringing in Christmas with a bang

My most memorable holiday happens to be a Christmas when I was just old enough to sleep on the top bunk. Being the youngest, I wasn’t alive during the fabled Christmas when my older brothers peeked, found presents hidden, and my parents returned everything to the North Pole to prove a point!

I don’t mean to imply that I was a good kid by any means, but the idea to go snooping for hidden presents would never even have occurred to me. Nonetheless, I was a party to the wisdom gained from that year. We took it very seriously. I never listened for reindeer (we didn’t have a chimney), and I didn’t l...