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Through history, even the great and famous have found trouble with the choice of gifts. Queen Victoria was clearly desperate when, as the story goes, she presented Mount Kilimanjaro to Kaiser Wilhelm for his birthday. Yet, the grandly useless gift can be endearing, and while most Americans cannot give mountains, there are other possibilities. Among them is the sauna built for one, developed by New York's Hammacher Schlemmer as an alternative to the standard size ("because it isn't easy to find the right five people to take a sauna together"). The Dauphin of France set a standard for the anti-gift when he presented the young Henry V with tennis balls, in insolent reference to his playboy reputation, and paid the price at Agincourt. Modern givers who want to choose an offensive present designed to break relations have a dizzyingly wide choice, ranging from a novelty ice tray that produces cubes in the form of nudes to a cookbook entitled something like The Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor.
Emerson said that the only true gift is a gift of self. All the greatest presents bear him out, whether it is Cleopatra offering herself to Caesar wrapped in a rug, or—on a more spiritual plane—the Juggler of Our Lady giving all he has: his little art. Not everyone can offer his own composition, as Richard Wagner did when he gave the Siegfried Idyll to his wife. But the art of giving would be immensely enhanced if more people today took whatever skill and time they had to make gifts themselves.
Today, the gift of time is perhaps the most important, even if it is ritualized: any society needs rituals. The true gift of the Magi was not the myrrh, frankincense and gold but the time and trouble they took to bring them. The effort —and its modern-day equivalent of hours at crowded counters—can also be a testimony of concern, also a gift of self.