The Perfect Present

Once upon a time, there was a man who worked very hard just to keep food on the table for his very small family. A family which consisted of himself and his five-year-old daughter Milly. His wife had sadly passed away a few years previously around Christmas time, due to a sudden and terminal illness and since then he had never really found any joy about the special day.

This particular year, a few weeks before Christmas, he found himself in an argument with little Milly after finding out that she had used up the only roll of flashy expensive gold wrapping paper. "Look Milly, you know money is tight round here! We have to work together on this! How am I supposed to wrap things up for people if you've taken all the decent paper!

"I'm sorry Daddy!" She timidly replied, sniffing back tears "I just needed it".

Sadly he was right, money was tight, he was working as many shifts as he could but still ends never seemed to quite meet, and if it wasn't for his kind elderly neighbours who looked after Milly while he was at work he didn't know how he would cope. He became even more upset when on Christmas Eve he saw that the child had used what looked like the entire roll of the expensive gold paper to decorate something that looked like a shoebox, which Milly had put under the Christmas tree. So now he was also concerned about where she had gotten the money to buy whatever it was in the shoebox.

Nevertheless, Christmas morning arrived the little girl, filled with excitement, brought the gift box to her father and said, "This is for you, Daddy!"

As he started to opened the box, the father was embarrassed by his earlier overreaction, it was just wrapping paper after all and he was regretting how he had shouted at her.

But when he opened the shoebox, he found it was completely empty and again his anger flared. "Have you any idea young lady," he said harshly, "when you give someone a present, there's supposed to be something inside! You wasted an entire roll of wrapping paper on nothing!!" With that he angrily threw the empty box on the floor.

Milly picked up the present from the floor, looked up at him with fat tears rolling from her eyes and whispered: "But Daddy, it's not empty. I blew kisses into it until it was all full."

The father was crushed. He fell on his knees, tear welling up in his eyes and put his arms around his precious little girl. He apologised and begged her to forgive him for his unnecessary anger.

From that day forward, the father keeps this little gold box by his bed, and whenever he is discouraged or faces difficult problems, or even when he is just feeling sad, he opens the box, takes out an imaginary kiss, and is thankful of the love of his beautiful little girl who had put it there.