What’s the best Christmas gift you ever got?
In The Big Bang Theory, socially-awkward genius Sheldon struggles with the whole concept of Christmas gift-giving. Why is it wrong to give someone something practical that they need? Why give someone something ostensibly useless? Sheldon just doesn’t get it — until waitress Penny gives him what would surely be to anyone else an insultingly pointless, valueless gift: a napkin used by Sheldon’s hero, Leonard Nimoy.
So, strangely, one of the most memorable gifts I got was from a workplace Secret Santa — sorry, Mum, Dad, kids. It was a copy of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. In itself, perhaps, not an especially memorable item, but it conveys the essence of what Sheldon finally understood from that used napkin: it’s the thought that counts.
Holding that book in my hand, I realised that there was actually one person in that benighted office who had actually bothered to get me. Instead of the cheap bottle of whisky I had dreaded, I held an even cheaper paperback (it had the Remaindered punch-mark and everything) — which I read with zeal, again and again, over the years.
My sister has a similar Secret Santa story: she is legendary for her obsessive need for pictures to be hung absolutely perfectly (I used to drive her nuts by telling her I’d shifted just one picture in the house a few millimetres). So she was delighted, one year, to get from Secret Santa a spirit level, tape measure and set square. It didn’t even matter if she never used them: somebody got her.
Other great Christmas gifts find meaning in their context. Fox News reader James R., of Greensboro, North Carolina, says that his was a basketball hoop game.
It was sort of like an arcade game. The basketballs were automatically fed back to the player, with a digital feature that kept score. I played it with one of my older brothers for hours, and we laughed so hard as we competed against each other. It was like we were in our own little bubble, staying up late and bringing snacks up to my bedroom so we could keep playing. We are 10 years apart in age, and I was eight years old at the time — and I remember being thrilled that my big brother was spending so much time with me.”
For Barbara Booth, co-founder and CEO of Go-Be, an antimicrobial tray sleeve travel accessory, her most treasured gift involved a great deal of thought from her father. When her mother passed away, each of her four daughters, unbeknownst to each other, asked their father for their mother’s gold cross necklace.
“On Christmas morning, he presented each of us girls with a gold box tied with a white ribbon. When we opened our boxes, we were all delighted — and teary-eyed — to find Mother’s gold cross inside. But we were also confused. Seeing the look on our faces, my father explained, ‘I went to a jeweler and had the same cross made for each of you girls. I asked him not to let me know which one was the original. I have no idea which one is Mom’s real cross. But does it really matter?’ he added. ‘She loved you all the same. She would’ve wanted each of you to have it. Please wear it and remember her.'”
For Patti Garibay, founder and executive director, American Heritage Girls, a Christian-based Guides-like organisation, the greatest gift was musical.
“As a child, my favorite gift was a Magnus Chord Organ. My father was disabled and money was limited, so this was a miracle gift to me. I recall on Christmas Eve as a young girl the majestic sound of the plastic keys as I played ‘Silent Night,’ hoping to catch sight of the Star of Bethlehem in the dark winter sky.”
Fox News
For musician, teacher, and Classical radio presenter Ed Ayres, the most memorable gifts have also been musical.
As a music teacher, I receive some beautiful gifts at the end of the year […] all these gifts are special, but the best gift is when a student comes into their lesson and they play a piece you haven’t asked them to play, they simply play it because they love the music so much. Lizzie came in and played on her viola the best version of Bohemian Rhapsody I have ever heard, and that includes the ones by Freddie Mercury. Claudia played a piece by Marin Marais and took my breath away with her sound and power. And Liam, who only two years ago was still playing barely grade one violin, played the Sarabande from Bach‘s first cello suite with so much grace and beauty, I was moved to tears.
ABC Australia
Obviously, we’re not all music teachers with gifted students, and we can’t all, every Christmas, come up with something as loaded with meaning as our passed Mother’s gold cross necklace, but that’s not the point of this story.
If every gift was the best ever, then, well, there’d be no best ever. “The best gifts” come along maybe once or twice in our lives, and we can never tell what they might be. As we see, they can be anything from a cheap basketball game to a paperback from the remainder bin.
You just never know.
That doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t enjoy all our other Christmas gifts, either. But part of the magic of Christmas is that one gift that surprises us, often for the most surprising reasons, and we remember it as the Best Christmas Present Ever.
