A Tale of Two Gifts

Every year on Christmas night, we go to my parents’ house for food and gifts and other fun. This year, my three sisters were there, along with my brother-in-law, five nieces, and five nephews.

It was a noisy, active, joy-filled Christmas house, just the way my parents like it.

As we gathered around the tree to distribute gifts, my sister Shaileen was keeping an eye on the youngest grandchild. He just turned 1, and he’s walking now, so he needs some extra attention. Because Shaileen—aunt and superhero that she is—was helping him open his gifts, she didn’t get to focus as much on her own presents.

Later, though, when she finally had a chance to start doing some of her own unwrapping, she found herself pulling out a shirt that looked familiar. In fact, she said she had already opened it a little earlier in the evening. At least she thought so.

It turned out that Shaileen received two identical shirts—one from my mother and one from my sister Maureen. They had shopped separately in two different states. Maureen had reached out to my mother to confirm that she was buying the right size, but she hadn’t mentioned where she was shopping or shared a photo of the shirt.

Out of all the gifts they could have selected, she and my mother bought the exact same shirt for Shaileen.

To add to the fun, Maureen and my mother also unknowingly bought matching sweaters for each other.

When you’re trying to select a gift for someone, you often focus on wanting to choose something unique or distinctive, the gift of all gifts, one that will be memorable and stand head and shoulders above the rest.

But this year we thoroughly enjoyed that people with different experiences, shopping in different parts of the country, with different ideas of what might make a great gift, happened to choose the exact same item.

And I was thinking that in many ways, it’s the sameness of Christmas that makes this such a beautiful season. We celebrate in so many different ways, but we hold onto traditions and threads that are constant from year to year, season to season.

We love finding something new in an unchanging story depending on where we are in life.

In fact, the true gift of Christmas is always the same—love come down from heaven to earth, love that changes everything, the Son of God made man, come to show us how to live and how to love.

And we can unwrap that gift with the same delight and joy every day.

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