The Gift of Giving

I have a friend since I have known since we were both 14 years old in high school. We both were in the same English class with Sister Thomas. We have kept in touch over more then 3 decades and every year we send each other Christmas cards and occasionally a Christmas gift. She is like a big kid when it comes to gifts. Although, we live only a few miles from each other we send each other gifts because it is easier since we both don't have cars at the moment. So, I was thinking about what to get her this year and she mentioned last year that she likes the nutcracker ornaments and collected them but when she broke up with her boyfriend he took some of them and I found one online for her and ordered it and told her that it would arrive sometime today or tomorrow at the latest. So, I got a notification that it was delivered and no sooner then I got the text she sends me a message on Facebook and asked was the box from me and can she open it now because she doesn't think she can wait until Christmas. I told her if she opened it up she would get coal in her stocking from Santa. She said oh she can't help but wanting to open it cause she is so excited and wanted to know what it was. I told her it was pretty pointless asking me because she knows I am not telling. So, far she says that so far she hasn't opened it but she is very tempted to. I give her a day if that before she gives into temptation and the box is opened. I should have had it gift wrapped but she would find a way to peek anyway. So, I save the $3 or so to have it wrapped. 

A few years ago we were not doing that well financially, we are a little better now but like everyone else not rich still trying to make ends meet and make a dollar out of 15 cents at times. So, for a couple of those years there was a group on Facebook that this high school girl ran for  low income kids to help get gifts and she ran it for a couple of years where she would try to get sponsors to get gifts for the kids and for those years my son had a lot of gifts. Thankfully, he got generous sponsors, and we discussed that even though he got a lot of gifts that is not the true meaning of Christmas and he understood that. So, this year for his birthday he got a gift card from Target and he said he wanted to go shopping so I thought that he wanted to get himself something from Target and took him. He picked out a toy and we came home. He didn't open it which I thought was strange. So, he told me that the toy was not for him it was for a kid that wouldn't get a gift this year and he told me to look up online where we can drop it off for our local toy drive. So, we dropped it off at the collection for the toy drive near us and even though he knows he won't get a lot of gifts like he did with the sponsors he knows that some kids won't get any gifts and he wanted to make sure one kid would. He said after all that is what Christmas is about right? I could not agree with him more.