This week’s Brouhaha on Park Slope Parents is about opening birthday presents at children’s birthday parents. Pro or Con? Discuss. I thought this post from Lorenzo Tijerina was really interesting. He gave his permission for me to reprint this. I loved the picture of life in San Antonio, Texas that he paints. He now lives in Park Slope.

My son is having a birthday party on Saturday and I’ve got to say this
whole discussion is starting to freak me out just a little bit.

For his last six birthday parties this wasn’t even an issue. Every year
he opened his presents at the party and if he didn’t act excited enough
then it was understood to be my job to act excited for him. I looked at
it as a manners test for him. Every year I told him beforehand that if
he should say thank you for every present and save any criticism for
later. It never even occurred to me that we had the option of not opening
the presents.

One year, it must have been last year, we ran out of time and we had to
rush through the opening of the presents. But I just took this as a
result of bad party planning on my part.

But we lived in San Antonio, Texas surrounded by family and our
etiquette was more nuanced. You had to make sure a certain tia’s (aunt’s)
pasta salad was completely eaten and you had to make sure the bigger kids
knew to save some of the pinata candy for the little ones. There were
matters of paying respects to the elder relatives and acting like that
$10 check from great grandma was redeemable for a million bucks.

But now we live here.

Obviously, for the "opening presents issue" to make it this far, it
must be a somewhat important trivial matter. Personally, I would be a
little disappointed not seeing the reaction to a gift I brought to a
birthday party. To me it seems silly to deny the whole present opening ritual
out of political correctness, but I don’t want to appear to be some
southern rube who doesn’t know ya’lls fancy ways of doing thing here up on
the Slope.

I guess my question is this: From the party’s you’ve been to and
hosted, has opening presents at the party become some kind of embarrassing faux pas that’s going to hurt my and my child’s already marginal social standing within Brooklyn’s brownstone elite?

Busily rethinking everything,
Lorenzo (father of now-seven Marcello)