Gifts Of The Heart

My mother was a sixth-grade teacher, and every year for Christmas she would come home from school with at least three or four bottles of very smelly perfume. Usually there would be some homemade cookies or candy, and occasionally an ornament for her tree. No matter what her students gave her, she always considered them treasures.

For the last several years of her life, my grandmother went to the same little store in town and bought T-shirts for my uncle and his family for Christmas. The T-shirts were always exactly the same: solid colors with no design on the front or back. She always had their names printed on the back in 2-inch white block letters. Then she wrapped them in recycled Christmas paper that she’d been saving since Eisenhower was president, and mailed them to my uncle’s home in California.

A friend of mine said her grandfather had always given her and her older sister the same gift every year too, only instead of T-shirts she always received a box of chocolate-covered cherries.

“Every year we got the same thing. To tell you the truth, I never was really that crazy about candy, but the Christmas after Granddad died I can’t tell you how much I missed those chocolate-covered cherries.”

It doesn’t matter whether the gift is smelly perfume, a T-shirt, or a box of chocolates, because it doesn’t matter what we give nearly as much as why we give. Love can make a small thing seem big. It can make an inexpensive thing seem priceless.

When something is given with love, it becomes the best kind of gift…a gift of the heart.

Happy holidays from the Kindreds and your Kentucky Living family!