This used to be the most predictable day of the year at our house.

Christmas mornings past would begin two hours before sunrise with a horde of frenzied children jumping up and down on our bed shrieking, “Get up, get up, Santa was here.”

Sleepy-eyed and pj’d, we would stumble to the living room to watch a mountain of presents under a perfectly ornamented tree converted to a mountain of rubble. By 8 a.m., 25 percent of the ornaments would be shattered and trampled into the shag carpeting, 50 percent of the presents would be cast aside and 100 percent of the children would be bored. It was a routine so rigid it could qualify as a ritual.

But children grow. Families evolve. Rituals are rewritten. And now, not only are we no longer sure what’s going to happen on Christmas morning, we don’t know where or when it might occur.

The bed-jumping, shrieking children have become adults, some of them with bed-jumping, shrieking children of their own. They have scattered to distant cities too far, too expensive, to get together for one day. Some of ours, for instance, have moved to Virginia, North Carolina and Oregon. As nearly as I can calculate, the most equitable solution would be for all of us to meet at a Holiday Inn in Kansas City, but I’m having trouble selling that.

And even the ones who live close to home pose a logistical challenge that defies resolution.

We could spend Christmas morning at the home of a nearby son who still has children of bed-jumping age, but that would mean getting up in the middle of the night in order to get there in time to see the mountain ravaged.

Or we could go to a daughter’s home to watch her children open their presents. But her children are mostly teenagers, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get out of bed before noon. Or even that day.

Arranging everyone’s schedule for them to gather around our tree has become impossible. Besides, we’re skipping the tree thing this year, because it seems pointless to have one that none of them will see. Even if we had a tree, there wouldn’t be a mountain of presents for them to open, because I have no idea what today’s kids want. Instead of a mountain of presents, all they’d find would be a molehill of gift certificates.

As a modern family, there seems to be no way to recapture the Norman Rockwell portrait that Christmas Day used to paint.

So maybe we’ll just have to Skype it.

Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.

Last Sunday, D.L. asked if it should be illegal to text while driving. Here are some responses by readers:

“I am all for banning the use of cell phones on the road and paying attention to the mounting deaths and injuries caused by accidents that involve the practice.”

— Kathryn Van der Heiden

“What about the GPS feature on phones? If they pass another nanny-state law like the one they are advocating, that means I can’t even use my phone as a guidance system! So we go back to having our wives read the map for us while we drive? I can’t wait because that used to be so much fun.

“11,000 kids a year drown accidentally in pools. Should we outlaw letting kids swim in pools without a parent in the water with them and send parents to jail who don’t?”

— Rod Yarger

“This has to be one of the dumbest questions ever posed, other than should one blow dry his or her hair while taking a bath? Frankly, I was surprised that the average time to compose a text message is 4.6 seconds. If I composed a text message when pulling out of my driveway each morning on the way to the office, I would still be working on it 10 miles later when I pulled into our parking lot. Of course, I would probably hit a tree in 4.6 seconds while driving down our street.”

—Tom Shimko, Beavercreek