The Best Gifts

When I started dating again after a long hiatus, my older daughter suggested that I get a “burner phone” – a cheap, disposable phone that I could easily get rid of (“burn”) in the event I encountered an unsavory creep online. I took her advice, and it worked well. When an online match wanted to move off the app and message me privately, I gave him the burner number. If he turned out to be a catfisher (a surprising number did – the percentage was more than half), I could block him, and as a backup, if he was persistent, I could just burn the whole phone and be done.

Then, I met a guy I really liked. Which presented a dilemma: how do I tell him, you don’t actually have my phone number? The number you have is one that I use exclusively for online dating. Maybe the youngsters are zen with this, but at my age, it feels like the romance-movie trope: I’ve lied to you from the beginning of our relationship. Now, how do I come clean without making you hate me?

In the end, I took a blank card and wrote my actual phone number inside. Nothing else. I gave it to him one night at dinner. He opened the card, frowned at it in confusion, and looked up at me.

I explained about the burner phone, and told him that the number inside the card is my actual phone number. Far from seeming upset about it, he seemed touched that our relationship had actually progressed to a point where I no longer felt the need to keep a layer of extra personal security between us. When he forgot the card at my house, he messaged me and asked me to save it for him.

We made it to Christmas. When I hung the stockings by my chimney with care, I made two extras: one for my new guy, and one for my daughter’s boyfriend of two years. Stockings are a long-cherished tradition in my family, and I was pleased to include the two new ones alongside mine, my daughters’, and the dog’s. But what to put in them? Stockings at my house are typically for your favorite candy, and one or two small things. For my two daughters, it’s pretty easy: makeup wipes, nail polish, small cosmetics, lotions – things women appreciate. But for two grown men who don’t really need anything, and who don’t use small luxuries on a regular basis the way that women use makeup? I wandered around Wal-Mart with my 98-cent stockings, waiting for inspiration to strike.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul coaches the Corinthian Christians on the subject of gifts. He’s talking specifically about spiritual gifts—the miraculous individual abilities that confirmed the Word of God for early Christians. He tells them to desire “the best gifts,” but then adds: “I’m going to show you an even better way.” The “better way” – even better than the very best gifts the Holy Spirit could give them – is the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13, in which Paul tutors the Corinthians in how to love each other. What’s a better gift even than miraculous powers of languages, prayer, and healing? Learning to love each other better.

I was wandering around the Wal-Mart with 98-cent stockings, fabric paint, and makeup wipes for my girls, wondering what to put in the guys’ stockings that would convey to them just how much they were wanted, just how intentionally and gladly we have included them. My guy had expressed reservations to me about feeling like an intruder in our family Christmas, and I didn’t want him to feel that way. So, I was stalking the aisles of Wal-Mart, looking for some little item that would adequately convey love.

I walked down the aisle with the picture frames. I looked at those and thought about my guy’s desk at work. My own desk at work is decorated with photos of the people I love, and I’ve been thinking I need to add a photo of him and me. I bet he doesn’t have a photo of us on his desk either, I thought. Then I thought about my daughter’s guy. I bet he doesn’t have a framed photo of the two of them. When you can carry it on your phone, in your pocket, who thinks of that? So I bought two 4×6 picture frames—small enough to fit in a stocking. And for my own guy, I decided it was time for another step forward. I had copies of my two housekeys made, and I put them in a card just like I had earlier done with my phone number. Now, on those nights when we’re meeting at my house and I get caught out late, he won’t drive the ninety minutes from his job just to wait in my driveway until I can get here.

We got together a few days ago. Some gifts are waiting until Christmas, but while we were all together, we exchanged stockings. My guy pulled the card from his stocking and looked at it. The last time I gave him a card, it was a step forward in our relationship, and he looked at it for a long minute before opening it. He ran his fingers over the two keys taped inside. Unlike with my phone number, I didn’t have to explain. You are not an intruder; I feel safe with you; and I think you’ll be spending more time here are implicit in the gift.

We made the guys open their photos together. My guy’s was a collage that Google Photos had automatically generated, with half a dozen photos of us. I printed the same one to put on my own desk. My daughter’s boyfriend got the first photo I ever snapped of them together. All told, the keys, the photo frames and the printed photos probably cost me ten bucks. But the amount of love conveyed? That went far beyond the money spent.

When we were finished with the stockings, my daughter’s boyfriend gave her the final gifts of the evening: he gave her a sketchbook that he had half-filled with drawings of their adventures playing an online game together. Halfway through the book, he’d written a letter, telling her that he wants their adventures to continue in the real world. And then he gave her a real-world ring—one that cost him virtually nothing, since it has been in his family for two generations, and yet: it meant everything.

Because, like all of the very best gifts, the real gift behind the object was a gift of love.