Being a dad I’ve hosted birth­day par­ties in the past and have often had to go to birth­day par­ties of the chil­dren of friends of ours. It’s a trade off — you buy my kid a gift and that enti­tles your child to receive a gift from my kid at your kid’s next party. Every par­ent is pay­ing off the other par­ent so that their kids can get some­thing at the birth­day party when it rolls around to being your child’s time again.

And often you’ll put a lot of effort and car­ing into choos­ing that spe­cial birth­day party gift. What does the child like? What is the age range on the gift? Does it have small parts and do they have a younger sib­ling that might choke on those parts? You want to make sure that you don’t get some­thing that the kid won’t play with because more and more stores aren’t let­ting you return, or even exchange for that mat­ter, toys that don’t have a receipt with them. You end up putting a lot of research into deter­min­ing just what kind of present you’re going to buy.

But lately there’s a new trend that until now I hadn’t noticed — the host of the birth­day party (the birth­day partier, if you will) not open­ing their gifts that the invited got for said partier until after the party’s over and everyone’s gone home.

After your effort, aren’t you enti­tled to a lit­tle clo­sure with that present that you took care to find and wrap? What’s up with that? You take your present to the party, your child has fun, and then you leave with­out the host open­ing their gifts. It’s like watch­ing all the way up until the end of Star Wars and not see­ing if the Rebels destroy the Death Star.

Any­way, I’m sound­ing the klaxon that this is a com­pletely uncool trend. Let it end now, par­ents of would-be present non-openers. Don’t even try it, muthas.