One of my treasures is a copy of The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry published in 1982 and illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger. I treasure the book primarily because it is beautifully laid out (written in script!) and the illustrations are enchanting.

The story was written in the early 1900s by a fellow who wrote under the name O. Henry. He used other aliases as well, probably because he’d spent time in jail. That would be an asset in today’s publishing world but it definitely wasn’t in Victorian times. He also wrote The Ransom of Red Chief which inspired the Christmas classic Home Alone and came up with the terms The Cisco Kid, Banana Republic and Baghdad on the Subway.

For those of you who’ve never read The Gift of the Magi, Della has only managed to scrape together one dollar and eighty-seven cents to buy her beloved Jim a Christmas present. And so she sells her most prized possession. Given their dire financial circumstances, she probably should have bought something practical with the money she earned but she doesn’t. The irony is, Jim does the same thing and so they both end up with gifts they can’t use.

Or did they, as O’Henry postulates, receive the best gift that can be given?

The cemetery where O’Henry is buried reports that – for over thirty years! – they routinely find envelopes containing … one dollar and eighty-seven cents on his grave. Doesn’t that fill you with sobs, sniffles and smiles? It does me.

“Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles and smiles with the sniffles predominating.” O.Henry