Added: 01/16/2007 |
A Christmas Present That Was a SurpriseThe writer of the following essay had a very thoughtful mother. Her mother taught her the importance of a Christmas present. The December after the writer had developed a close friendship with a young female neighbor, her mother helped her to find a meaningful Christmas gift. She provided the writer with a small book that had this title: A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You.
During that search, most children have one thing on their mind. In searching for that one Christmas present, a young child typically looks for the gift that would answer his or her Christmas wish. A young child can not always picture the sort of Christmas present that a parent might consider to be a valuable and useful gift.
That fact explains how two Xmas presents once escaped the notice of two young Pennsylvania girls. The presents were identical—two wooden, straight-back chairs, each with a wicker cushion. The chairs could not be hidden easily. So the mother put the chairs in the basement. By placing them in a spot close to the furnace, she hoped the setting would disguise the chairs.
Now the two girls who would be getting those chairs sometimes played in the area around the furnace. In fact, they saw the chairs before Christmas morning, but they did not realize that each chair was a Christmas present. The two girls had never before received furniture on Christmas Day.
About five years later the mother of those same two girls again purchased for each daughter a Christmas present that could be used in the bedroom. Those later gifts took up less space than the chairs; they were not difficult to hide. Still they presented the mother with a different sort of problem.
The mother had purchased a telephone for each girl’s room. That purchase occurred prior to the appearance of the present-day telephone stores. The mother did not see any point in attempting to wrap those two gifts. She sensed that the phones would bring big smiles on Christmas morning, and so she wanted to design a clever way of revealing their existence.
The mother called the phone company and arranged for the phone to ring on Christmas morning. On the morning of December 25th, each of her daughters awoke to a ringing phone. At first the haze of sleep slowed the discovery of their surprise gift. They then realized that the loudly ringing phones were located right under their beds.
For some reason the phones caused few problems. Unlike many teenagers, the two girls did not spend countless hours talking on the telephone. Only on one occasion did one of the daughters make enough phone calls to bring a complaint from the mother who had purchased the phone. Later even that one complaint became obscured by praise for the person who had received more than one phone call from a girl in Pennsylvania.
The mother once objected to all the calls that her one daughter had made to the Connecticut home of a college roommate. The mother did not stop to think about the fact that that roommate had an older brother. The mother later discovered that the phone she had given her one daughter helped that daughter to communicate with her future husband.
Article comments:
No comments for this article yet. Post your comment now!
