Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1895 — Receiving Gifts. [ARTICLE]

Receiving Gifts.

“I’d give a good deal to dare tell my aunt what to say to me when I give her this,” said a bright young girl, as she finished and folded up a beautiful afghan that she had been making as a Christmas gift for a favorite aunt. “Why? What will she say?” asked her friend, who knew that Helen’s auut was very fond of her pretty niece. “Oh’ll she say it cost too much, or she’s afraid I have spent too much time over it, or she wonders I didn’t choose differing colors instead of shades of red, or something disagreeable. Aunt Fanny doesn.’t mean to make anybody uncomfortalrj, but the truth is, she doesn't know how to receive a gift. “My mother is so different; she is always lovely about everything one gives her, and always pleased. She looks and looks at a thing, pats it and praises it, and when we children were little, she used to carry our presents around the house with her, saying they were too precious to part with. “A 15-cent basket or a badly-made pincushion was always ‘just the one thing she really needed,’ and the costliest present I ever gave her, a cloisonne vase, only made her say, though I knew she caught her breath at my extravagance, ‘lt’s such a comfort to be a mother of a girl with so much taste.’ “About six months afterward she told me that she had two Christmas presents in one from me last time. I took the hint and got a cheaper present next holidays, but you see she saved my feelings at the time. “She’s just the same way to papa and all of us. He gave her a perfectly dreadful machine of a coffee-pot once, one of those French ones that won’t go, and she ma<l>- coffee with it on the table for monuis, till even papa begged her to banish tMb thing!” Giving presents at Christmas is a source of great pleasure to most people, but nearly all have a few friends who take the edge off their pleasure by their ungracious fashion of receiving gifts. On the other hand, there are people whose joy in receiving the simplest thing doubles the delight of the friend who bestows it. Every one likes to see a gift appreciated, and a person who receives with heartiness really makes it “more blessed to gi’*.”