Thank you Catscankim for responding to my questions. I appreciate your time and effort in doing so. So now I have learned an important lesson about curing. And I am wholeheartedly guilty then of not paying too much attention to soapmaking 101, it seems.
I guess I will have to put "only use after xx January 2021" disclaimer/warning labels on the soap if I want to give them out as stocking fillers - which I suppose is not as big a smash as burning my family's skin off with uncured soap!!!
Thanks so much for giving me the heads up.