There is a lovely little story by the American writer O. Henry called The Gift of the Magi.
A young couple, poor, want to give each other Christmas gifts. Their choices, their sacrifices, teach each other about love.
At the end of the story, there is a paragraph about gift giving and wisdom.
You might enjoy it. HERE
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since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
One of my favorites.
Amazon offered a free kindle download of it for a while before Christmas. The husband and I always read it and a few other classics aloud to each other on Christmas Eve after the children have gone to bed. Thanks for sharing, Father!
It is a story which my 8th graders and I would read aloud for religion class as Christmas neared.
The public school here in Kansas have the freshman read this.
I always liked that story. One of the things I like is that if you read it with a materialistic mentality, the exchange of gifts doesn’t make any sense and seems like a waste. You have to read it from a loving perspective and then you know that something of value was exchanged.
There is a very moving filming of O Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ54x0Zu_aU beginning at about 26:00, introduced by John Steinbeck.
It’s a lovely story, and as brilliantly pointed as O. Henry’s stories invariably are.
It reminds me of another (more rough-edged, but quite touching) Christmas short story by Damon Runyon: ‘Three Wise Guys” – set in “Bethlehem, Pa.”
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks11/1100651h.html