One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That is how The Gift of the Magi opens, with a woman counting coins on a Christmas Eve, and O. Henry’s story has been read, adapted and quoted ever since it appeared in 1905. It is a story that many people think they know from a summary: a wife sells her hair, a husband sells his watch, and each is left with a useless present. Reading the actual text shows more craft, more humor and more care than the summary suggests.
The story, told straight
Della and James Dillingham Young live in a furnished flat. The rent is eight dollars a week. James, called Jim, once earned thirty dollars a week, but his pay has dropped to twenty, and the flat shows it. Della has saved a pitiful sum over months of squeezing the grocer and the butcher. She wants to buy Jim a present, and she wants it to be worthy of him.
The couple has two treasures. One is Jim’s gold watch, handed down from his father and grandfather. The other is Della’s hair, which falls below her knees like a brown cascade. Della goes to a shop kept by Madame Sofronie and sells her hair for twenty dollars. With the money she hunts through the stores and finds a platinum fob chain for Jim’s watch, priced at twenty-one dollars. She pays, and goes home with eighty-seven cents.
When Jim comes home and sees her cropped head, he stares, stunned, but not in anger. He gives her his present: a set of tortoise-shell combs, with jeweled rims, which she had admired in a shop window on Broadway. They are for hair she no longer has. Della laughs and cries and shows him the chain. He sits down on the couch, smiles, and tells her he sold the watch to buy the combs.
How the gift of the magi earns its ending
The story’s last paragraph steps back from the couple and speaks directly to the reader about the Magi, the wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus in the Christmas story. O. Henry says these two foolish children, in the flat, have sacrificed the greatest treasures of their house for each other. Then he adds that of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are wisest.
They are the Magi.
That final line makes a claim: that the failed exchange is not a failure at all. The objects have become useless, but the intention has not.
The ending works partly because of preparation. O. Henry has set up both treasures early, so that when the sacrifice comes we feel its weight. He has also given Della a moment of weakness, a single tear on the worn carpet as she decides, before she squares her shoulders. He allows her to be human before she is noble. And he has made Jim’s reaction quiet. The story does not have a shouting scene or a reproach.
The narrator’s voice
If you have only heard the story summarized, you may be surprised by how talkative O. Henry is. He addresses the reader, jokes about the budget, and inflates his sentences with grand words for small things. The flat is a place where the name on the mailbox seems to be thinking of shrinking to a modest initial. The queen of Sheba, if she lived across an airshaft, would find her jewels outshone by Della’s hair. That mock-grand style is part of the charm. It lets him say tender things without sounding sentimental, because he has already winked at the reader.
The writer behind the twist
O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter, born in North Carolina in 1862. His life was not tidy. He worked as a pharmacist, a draftsman and a bank teller in Texas, was later convicted of embezzlement from the bank, and served time in an Ohio prison, where he began writing stories seriously under the pen name. After release he moved to New York and wrote prolifically, often a story a week for newspapers. The Gift of the Magi first ran in a New York Sunday newspaper in December 1905, and was collected in The Four Million in 1906. The title refers to the then-popular phrase about New York’s four hundred elite, and the book insists that the other four million deserve stories too.
He died in 1910, aged 47. In that short period he left several hundred stories, many with surprise endings. The phrase “an O. Henry ending” became a literary shorthand.
What a twist ending needs
Comparing this story with Maupassant’s The Necklace is useful. Both depend on a reversal. But their moods differ, and so do their methods.
- Symmetry. O. Henry builds the story as a mirror: two sacrifices, two gifts, two uselessnesses. The reader sees the second half coming in outline, if not in detail, and that anticipation is part of the pleasure.
- Fairness. The clues are planted: the watch is mentioned early, the combs in the window are mentioned early, and the chain’s price is exactly the amount Della gets for her hair, within a dollar.
- Warmth. The reversal does not punish anyone. It turns a loss into a different kind of gain.
Why it still gets taught
Teachers like this story because it is clear. A student can identify the setup, the complication, the turn and the resolution. Its themes of love, money and sacrifice are easy to name. But there is a harder question worth asking: is the story saying that gifts do not matter, or that they matter enormously? Jim’s response is to suggest putting the presents away for a while, then to make supper. The practical man restores the ordinary world. The story sits comfortably in that ordinary world, which is its quiet strength.
Critics sometimes call it sentimental, and in places it is. Yet sentiment handled with humor and a good sense of proportion is not a fault. The story admits the foolishness of its characters, and loves them anyway.
Closing thoughts
If you have not read The Gift of the Magi in full since school, try it again. It runs only a few pages, and the voice is livelier than memory suggests. Pay attention to the moments before the twist: the hair, the chain, the small tear on the carpet. They are where the story does its real work. By the time the Magi arrive in the last paragraph, you have already been persuaded.
