What if you wrote 600 short stories, but posterity remembers you for just one? Would you be pleased?

It’s hard to know what American writer O. Henry (1862-1910) would say about our ongoing embrace of his thought-provoking story The Gift of the Magi, first published in 1905. His own life was tumultuous, marked by troubles, struggles, and mixed success as an author. Yet, his international fame rests on one brief story, dashed off reportedly in two hours for an editor right before O’Henry was due to be fired!

We Americans are not great lovers of the genre of short story. Readers elsewhere are. In Russia, the short stories by writers like Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and  Zoshenko mark vital stages in literary development and still intrigue young readers. The same is true of short stories from other lands we could name. But in America, the era when short-story writing captivated the public imagination seems permanently consigned to the past.

Short stories require a focused, motivated reader seeking more than entertainment. By their very nature, short stories need to be intense in substance, characterization, and twists of plot. The author has just paragraphs, not pages, to earn the reader’s interest. Ideally, the reader is expected to complete the story in a single sitting. So, whereas a novel may be put down, set aside, even abandoned for a spell, its drama left in mid-air, the parameters of suspense fueling a short story ideally require us to stay with it.

And stay with it we do in the case of O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. His casting of this story draws us more deeply into the lives of the two characters Jim and Della than seems possible within the slim count of c. 2200 words. But first, let us remember who O. Henry really was.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina in the second year of the Civil War, William Sydney Porter (who took O Henry as his nom de plume, or pen name) lost his mother at age 3. His educated father, a doctor, retreated into his own world of “tinkering,” fueled by alcoholism and depression. The young Porter had to scrounge around to make do.

One of the best periods of his youth involved living two years on a ranch in Texas—a venture spurred in hopes of helping his lungs escape the family curse of tuberculosis. One of the toughest periods, years later, would be the three years spent in a penitentiary for a somewhat mysterious charge of embezzlement after he had begun working as a writer.

Along the way there would be much sadness and certain joys: a young marriage, death of a newborn son, an initial good stretch of success at publishing stories and starting his own magazine, shifting of jobs, a self-imposed exile in Honduras after the aforementioned accusation of embezzling, and a return to Texas to care for his dying wife Athol (after whom Della likely was modeled), which led to his prosecution and sentencing.

He used his time well in prison to write. After release and a move to New York City, his profile as a writer rose notably. Suffice it to say, he had experienced more than enough to write about.

The turmoil of O. Henry’s life, and America’s own tumult during the the years of his life, are all brushed away in The Gift of the Magi. With immediate quietude, the author focuses solely on a young couple, struggling financially, who seek to give one another a Christmas gift of value. The twist of the tale is well known: she sells her luxurious knee-length tresses to buy him a gold chain for his watch, while he sells the watch to buy her the expensive hair-combs she long has admired.

The final paragraph of the story gives the reader something not often found in such a short story, namely a “moral” that changes the tale from a semi-tragic vignette into a timeless tale with a luminous vista: 

The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men— who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I have told you the story of two children who were not wise. Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for the other. But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days: Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the magi.

Because of this passage, The Gift of the Magi is sometimes referenced as a Christmas fable. Fables, though, tell their truths by portraying something unlikely to happen, such as a tortoise besting a hare in a foot race or a crane repaying the fox’s greed by flipping the circumstances. O. Henry’s story of Della and Jim easily could have happened. In fact, if you live long enough, some version of this plot will happen in your life—maybe not as succinctly or poignantly, but worthy of note nonetheless.

Della moves quickly beyond her disappointment. “My hair grows so fast, Jim,” she says. Those combs will one day grace new tresses. And Jim knows that the gold chain will connect to a different watch in the future–a watch made more valuable because of it. Accordingly, Jim suggests that they put their gifts away “and keep ‘em awhile. They’re too nice to use just at present.” And they move on, doing the only sensible thing they can:

And now suppose you put the chops on.

So put supper on. And when you can, gather with your family to share The Gift of the Magi. In so few words, O. Henry’s gem of a masterpiece reminds us that the real exchange of gifts at Christmas will always be our devotion to one another. And if a writer can achieve that, even in a single story, then he has presented the world a timeless treasure.