Partridge in a Pear Tree

"Mom, you have a gift over here from Mark and Rhonda," our son, Greg, spoke over the phone.  "If you want to come over and eat, you can pick it up," he suggested.  Oh, how nice! I thought.  We were expecting our older son and his wife  the day after Christmas, but maybe they wanted to be sure the gift got here before then, I concluded.  Since we were already eating supper, we told Greg we would get it the next day.

Today we went by their house to deliver some Christmas presents, and they showed me the box on the coffee table.  In fact, there were two identical boxes marked Harry & David, Royal Riviera Pears from the Fruit of the Month Club, one of which was addressed to them.  Oh. Pears!  I remembered last year that they had sent some to our son, Jamie, who was hosting a family gathering in Houston.

I opened the box, exclaimed over the beautiful pears, then noticed a card that was slipping  onto the coffee table.  I picked it up and saw that it had a gift card to a restaurant inside it. "Olive Garden!" I squealed. "Oh, they shouldn't have done that, too!"   Then, noticing the generous amount of the gift, I said magnanimously, "This is big enough that we can take you guys with us!"

"What is the amount?" Greg asked quizzically.  When I told him,  he said, "I'm afraid that is Joanna's (his wife's) card."

"Oh, you  mean they got you one, too?" was my clueless response.  Turns out I had taken the lid from their box of pears that they had previously opened, and they had laid the unrelated gift card in there for safe-keeping!

We laughed, and I recalled what happened when Mark had sent Jamie pears last year.  Ever the wit, Jamie texted his big brother with something like, "Mark, I got a gift from you, but someone had stolen the contents and replaced it with pears!"  Mark didn't read the whole text but called me and asked me if Jamie's house had been broken into, saying he'd gotten a message about something being stolen!  It took awhile to straighten everything out, when we all had a good laugh.

Probably no other gift-giving occasion is  fraught with such a comedy of errors as is Christmas.  Little children scream in terror as they are thrust on Santa's lap, to their parents' sympathetic amusement. Gifts of wearables are often the wrong size, color or style; re-gifting can be disastrous, and guessing someone's taste can be iffy.  I've even seen games and surveys on "The strangest gift I have ever received."  (My kids used to come up with strange, but earnest gifts to me, ranging from Tarn-X and dishcloths in my stocking to a gift-wrapped industrial-size box of Tide from my teen-ager! With six kids, they knew I did a lot of dishes and laundry!)

The only Perfect Gift was on the first Christmas when Jesus was born.  For all our well-meaning efforts, our gift giving can only be a pale comparison to the expression of Love the Father gave us.  Nevertheless, in our clumsy, human way and adding a little mirth and merriment to our memories, we continue to give gifts, ever looking to our Example who gives the gift of eternal life.