52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 18, April 30 - May 6, 2026
#52ancestors
Prompt: Tradition
Christmas Eve morning the
phone rings. My mother answers the phone but instead of
Hello, she says “Christmas
Eve Gift”. Then seconds later she starts laughing. She got one over on her sister. After talking to her for a little while, she hangs up and calls her other sister. But her sister knows that trick,
too. She starts laughing again before
she wishes her sister Merry Christmas.
The phone rings again and it is her brother. Christmas Eve morning was a time that my Mother
always talked to her brother and 3 sisters. It didn’t matter that long distance
was expensive back then. What mattered was counting coup on her siblings. The McCarley siblings with their Mother Thank you to Kerry McCarley Balthrop for the photo 
“Christmas Eve Gift” was a game they played as children that their parents had taught them. The first person to say “Christmas Eve Gift” was to receive a gift from the person they beat to it. I don’t know if they really gave gifts as kids. I don’t think they did as adults. It was really all about being the first to say it. My siblings and I don’t do it very often but some years I call them to say, “Christmas Eve Gift”.
I had never heard of anyone else playing this game, so I thought it was just one of the strange things my family does. One day I decided to do a little research on it. One website said it was a Scottish tradition. That made sense to me since my mother’s maiden name was McCarley with other Scots-Irish names sprinkled into her background. In anticipation of this post, I decided to look up that information again but couldn’t find it. However, I had an interesting conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI).
There doesn’t appear to be any documentation that this game was ever played in Scotland. In fact, Christmas was barely celebrated in Scotland for centuries after the reformation. Their main winter holiday & gift giving was at Hogmanay (New Year Eve). One of the first documented mentions of the “Christmas Gift” game was in a letter from Thomas Jefferson in 1809. He wrote to John Wayles Eppes that his nephew and his cousins were running about “bawling out 'a merry christmas' 'a christmas gift' “ The game with “Christmas Gift” came before “Christmas Eve Gift”.
It’s first mentioned in Virginia, then documented in the Appalachia area of TN, SW Virginia, and Western NC. The tradition follows the same migration route that many of the Scots-Irish traveled going south and then west. From SC, many went to Tennessee or Alabama, then Mississippi and East Texas. Perhaps that is why my first research thought it came from Scotland.
The mentions of “Christmas Eve Gift” came later but has been documented in Kentucky and Tennessee families as well as in Texas especially with families with ties to the Appalachia. The Scots-Irish were strongly represented in the Appalachia area. The core of Appalachia is considered Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee & Kentucky, Western North Carolina, and all of West Virginia.
The McCarleys were in Spartanburg, SC in the 1700s, then moved through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas before settling in Indian Territory in the early 1900s. Spartanburg, SC is in the edge of the Appalachia with a heavy Scots-Irish settlement.
The McCarleys were in Tennessee and that may be where they started playing the “Christmas Eve Gift” game. Maury County, TN is outside of the Appalachia, but it was heavily settled by people from the Appalachia core. By the time the McCarleys were in Tennessee, the “Christmas Gift” game had a variation, “Christmas Eve Gift”. There is a possibility that Maury County, TN is where the McCarleys started playing the “Christmas Eve Gift”. If not there, it may have been while they lived in Marshall County, MS which was within the extended area of Appalachia and was heavily settled by Tennessee migrants.
It kind of makes me sad that “Christmas Eve Gift” is dying out in our family.
Sources:
Cassidy, F. G., & Hall, J. H. (Eds.). (1985–2013). Dictionary of American Regional English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Christmas gift (exclamation). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 29, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_gift_(exclamation)
Heckert, A. (2016, December 23). “Christmas gift!” The roots of a Southern holiday saying. Garden & Gun. Retrieved April 29, 2026, from https://gardenandgun.com/christmas-gift-the-roots-of-a-southern-holiday-saying/
Jefferson, T. (1809, December 25). Letter to John Wayles Eppes. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/christmas
Thomas, J. (1942). Blue Ridge Country. New York, NY: Holt.
Wilson, T. (n.d.). Christmas gift. Blind Pig and The Acorn. Retrieved April 29, 2026, from https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/christmas-gift/
