THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

The Gift of the Magi’ is a short story by the US short-

story writer O. Henry, whose real name was William
Sydney Porter (1862-1910). His stories are
characterised by their irony, their chatty narrative
style, their occasional sentimentality, and by their
surprise twist endings.

Della is a devoted young married woman. On Christmas Eve she

finds that she has only one dollar and eighty-seven cents as savings to
buy a gift for her husband, Jim. She manages a reduction in the
expenses for the family for this occasion. They are living in an eight-
dollar-a-week flat. They are having bare minimum in their
surroundings, which is even by the greatest stretch of the
imagination, do not meet the standards of poverty. Still, Della
determines that she cannot live through Christmas without giving the
gift to Jim.

Della is struggling to find a solution to her problem. Then she gets an

idea about it. She quickly puts on her brown coat and brown hat and
then she moves towards a hairdresser named Madame Sofronie.
Sofronie does cutting of her hair till shoulder and hence gives her 20
dollars for it.

After that, Della starts searching for the perfect present for Jim. She
does a hard attempt to find a suitable gift, but she was disappointed
due to not finding a suitable one. Then she remembers Jim’s most
treasured possession, which is his grandfather’s gold watch. But Jim
has to tie a leather strap to the watch as its original chain broke.
Therefore she decides to buy the strip, as it will be precisely a
suitable gift for him. She moves many shops and looking for just the
right watch chain. Finally, she finds a handsome, platinum chain. Its
cost is 21 dollars. Della buys it and then returns home with the
remaining money left.
At the flat, Della is worrying that Jim might not find her attractive
without her hair as earlier. So, she spends the rest of the evening
making her hair more presentable as much possible. Then she
prepares the dinner. Jim comes back to home on the daily routine
time. As soon as he sees Della without her long, beautiful hair, he
stops shockingly. Della is clueless that what to make of his reaction.
He is neither angry nor sad, just looking as surprised and confused.
When Della questions him about, Jim gives her the gift and tells her
that it is his Christmas present to her and she can understand his
reaction only after seeing the gift. She opens it and finds that it
contains a set of combs. He had bought this gift for her beautiful hair,
and now she had no hair to put them in.

Then Della gives her gift to him to cheer him up. But, now it is the
turn of Della for a surprise. The gift for Jim now has no use for him.
Jim tells her that in order to arrange enough money to buy the combs,
he had to sell his gold watch. After that, Jim smiles and tells her that
they should keep the gifts with them to remind themselves about the
love which exists between them for each other.

Analysis of the story:

This story is really a beautiful love story with a precious and

important message. It ends with the storyteller comparing both gifts
to the gifts of the Magi. Magi were the three wise men who are said
to have brought the first Christmas gifts to the baby Jesus. Anyone
can make a conclusion about their foolish characters. Because they
gave up their most valuable possessions and were left with
completely useless items. They had to sacrifice their most precious
belongings in order to get these gifts. Thus they showed that their
love was far more valuable to them than any such things. Therefore
we should make the right impression about them as their gifts are
displaying powerful themes of love, sacrifice, and hence the concept
of true value and worth.
The story begins the day before Christmas with a young woman named
Della sitting at home counting her savings. The home she lives in with her
husband, Jim, is a cheap, furnished rental apartment. When they first
moved in Jim was earning more money, but the couple has fallen on hard
times and now live in poverty. Della has been putting money aside after
buying groceries for many months. She is sad and anxious because
despite her efforts, she has not saved enough money. She had been
hoping to buy Jim something special for Christmas with her savings. Della
begins to cry on her couch as she realizes she does not have enough
money to buy Jim a Christmas present.

After she stops crying, Della cleans up her face and looks out the window
lost in thought. She suddenly catches a glimpse of herself in the dingy
mirror on the wall and gets an idea. She lets down her long brown hair
and looks at it for a little while. Della’s hair, notable for its beauty, is her
prized possession. She puts on her old coat and hat and visits a shop that
buys and sells hair. The shopkeeper, Madame Sofronie, agrees to cut and
buy Della’s hair. Della spends the rest of the day going around the city
looking for the perfect gift for Jim. His prized possession is a gold pocket
watch that has been passed down through his family. She wants to buy
him a nice chain to go with it, something special and rare. Eventually, she
finds the perfect platinum chain. It costs all the money she got from
selling her hair, plus most of her savings. Della goes home feeling very
excited to give Jim his present.

When Della gets home, she tries to style her new haircut as best she can.
She worries that Jim will be angry and will no longer think she is pretty.
When Jim sees Della has cut her hair, he gets a strange look on his face.
Not knowing what it means, Della goes to him and quickly explains that
she sold her hair to buy him a Christmas present. In response, Jim hugs
her and tells her he loves her no matter what her hair looks like. He then
gives her a Christmas present: a set of jeweled tortoiseshell combs she’d
once admired in a shop window. Della loves the present, but she bursts
into tears when she realizes she is unable to use Jim’s thoughtful gift. As
Jim comforts her, she reassures him her hair will grow back quickly. She
then excitedly gives him the platinum watch chain. Jim laughs and reveals
he sold his prized watch to pay for the combs. The narrator concludes the
story by praising the couple for their selfless gifts of love, calling them
even wiser than the three wise magi who brought gifts to the baby Jesus
on the first Christmas Eve.

It is Christmas Eve. Jim and Della are a married

couple living in a modest furnished flat in New York.
They have little money. The story opens with Della
upset because she has just one dollar and eighty-
seven cents to spend on a Christmas present for her
husband.

The narrator tells us the married couple each have a

possession in which they take great pride. For Jim, it’s
a gold watch that had been his father’s and, before
that, his grandfather’s. Della’s prized possession is
her beautiful hair.

Della goes to a woman who deals in hair goods. This

woman agrees to buy Della’s hair for twenty dollars.
With the newly acquired money, Della goes to buy a
platinum fob chain for Jim’s gold watch. This costs her
twenty-one dollars, leaving her just eighty-seven
cents in the whole world. When she gets home, she
sets about curling what’s left of her hair so it looks
presentable.

When Jim gets home, he is surprised by his wife’s

actions, but when she explains why she had her hair
cut off, he embraces her and gives her the present he
has bought her: two jewelled tortoiseshell combs she
has long admired in a shop window. The combs are
useless to her until her hair grows out again, but at
least she can give Jim his present …

But in a last twist, Jim tells Della that he sold his gold
watch to pay for the expensive combs he bought for
her. So now, she has two combs but no hair to use
them on, and he has a platinum fob chain for a gold
watch he no longer owns.

‘The Gift of the Magi’: analysis

Many of O. Henry’s short stories – the majority of
which stretch to only five or six pages – are marked
by their ironic twists, and ‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a
good example of this typical feature of his work.

In their attempts to buy each other their dream

Christmas gift, young Jim and Della end up sacrificing
the very things that their presents are designed to
complement: the combs for Della’s (sold) hair, and
the chain for Jim’s (sold) watch. As the narrator
observes in the final paragraph:

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 O. Henry is not inviting us to laugh at their folly,

but to celebrate their sacrifice. Indeed, what
motivated them was not foolishness but wisdom, as
the narrator remarks in the story’s closing words:

But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be

said that of all who give gifts these two were the
wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they
are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the
magi.

So there are, in a sense, two surprise twists at the

end of ‘The Gift of the Magi’: the trademark plot twist
which characterises most of O. Henry’s short stories,
and the narratorial ‘twist’ in which he overturns our
initial response – which might be to laugh good-
naturedly at the unhappy turn of events which have
just been narrated – and makes a moral point that Jim
and Della behaved out of wisdom, even though they
ended up with ‘useless’ presents from each other.

This is all well and good, but it’s worth noting that the
narrator doesn’t gloss why he believes that Jim and
Della were ‘wisest’ of all gift-givers. Of course, ‘wise’
here is suggested by the Magi, the Zoroastrian
astrologers who, in the Gospel of Matthew, visited the
infant Jesus and brought him gifts of gold,
frankincense, and myrrh: hence the title of the story.

But what makes Jim and Della wise? And why doesn’t
O. Henry tell us? Is it because he wanted us to make
up our own minds, or did he assume that the answer
was fairly self-explanatory?

The latter seems more likely. For surely the ‘moral’ of

‘The Gift of the Magi’, given its Christmas setting and
the fact that Jim and Della clearly love each other and
treat each other well despite having no money to
afford the finer things in life, is that love is more
important than possessions. And when it comes to
Christmas and buying gifts for our loved ones, it really
is the thought that counts.

But there’s a little more to ‘The Gift of the Magi’ than

this rather hackneyed old adage, which would reduce
the story to a sentimental and rather twee fable
about ‘giving being better than receiving’ and ‘love
being more important than money’. Both of these
statements are relevant to the story, but what is also
relevant is the element of sacrifice the two characters
make, and their reaction to learning the implications
of this.

So Jim is happy to part with a gold watch that has

been passed down the male line for three
generations, while Della is happy to lose her hair
(which would, despite her protestations, take many
months to grow back fully) in order to purchase the
gift the other one most desires. But with the story’s
twist, they learn that their personal sacrifices –
committed for their love of the other one – have been
in vain.

But they are happy about this, not because of the

gesture of buying the gift but the great cost that it
has incurred for the other. Love, O. Henry seems to
say, is about giving up that which you most treasure
in order to show your beloved – whom you should
love even more – the extent of your devotion.

In other words, what is remarkable about ‘The Gift of

the Magi’ is that its moral seems to be not just ‘giving
is better than receiving’ but ‘giving and losing is all
that matters’, since what they receive is of no
practical use to them.