Age before booty.

Of course, the annual tradition of feeling like crap because relatives and relative strangers have drifted out of her life isn't the only one Elly plans on maintaining so as to better blight the Holidays. I should think that now that she's getting on in years, she's probably planning on making the grandkids wait until she and John toddle on out of bed and trudge on down to the Pattermanse to open their gifts. Her reasoning there is that she wants to experience at least one Christmas in which children do not rush for their presents in an insane stampede. Sadly, since her grandchildren are the same sort of spoiled, materialistic, parent-hating monsters her children were before they realized how much they were breaking their poor mother's great big heart, the baffling and awful pattern insists on repeating itself. The conclusion Elly draws from all of this is that for some reason that probably has to do with a love of chaos and hatred of parents, children are greedy and selfish and want not to make good things last.

Contrast her with Grandma Carrie and you'll see just how God-damned nuts Elly is. John's mother, you see, has the smarts to realize that while Elly wants to have a perfect Christmas like she sees on television and in movies, real life ain't nearly so neat and tidy and children don't see what's under the tree in the same way adults do nor do they experience time as passing by at the same rate. While she does want to have her breakfast at her usual time and will thus make them wait a bit longer so that her idiot daughter-in-law will shut up about a decorum that she doesn't seem to have, she does so in the knowledge that her grandkids have spent pretty much the last month obsessing over what could be in the brightly-colored boxes and thus regard the few minutes more as a source of torment. She'd thus rather make a snarky comment meant to head off a stupid lecture about greed than endure being the focus of unsolicited mawkishness about how much children allegedly hate old people.