“One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher, until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.” A few lines later O. Henry wrote, “Tomorrow would be Christmas Day and she had only one dollar and eighty-seven cents with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always were. Only one dollar and eight-seven cents to buy a present for Jim.”
He wrote under the name O. Henry, a pseudonym for William Sydney Porter. Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature said, “American short story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace–in particular, the life of ordinary people in New York City. His stories expressed the effect of coincidence on character through humor–grim or ironic–and often had surprise endings…” As was the case with one of his most famous. This story was originally published in The New York Sunday Worldin 1905. There are two main characters, husband and wife James and Della Dillingham Young. In the end, she cuts her beautiful long hair for twenty dollars in order to buy her husband a platinum fob for his coveted pocket-watch. When he comes home, and they open their gifts, she realizes he sold the watch in order to buy her beautiful combs for her hair.
There is a moral to O. Henry’s tale. He writes, “The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men–who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who receive gifts, these two were the wisest. Of all who receive and give gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.” O. Henry.
A story that still rings true over a hundred years later…
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Don Jackson
