I have an embarrassing secret. I love getting presents. I know it is supposed to be more blessed to give than to receive. I know that 50% of all Christmas gifts are grudging Secret Santa purchases, and 100% of those are always the third item in a Boots 3-for-2 special – a Soap & Glory shower puff. And I know I’m too old and too ugly for stockings and surprises. First, I’m at a truly privileged point in my life where I already have everything I already need. Second, my top gift from Christmas 2021 was a high-sided sauté pan. I’m not going to wake up on 25 December and find a shiny bicycle under the tree.
And yet I live in hope. I long for the romance of surprise. The bar has been set high. At Christmas 2012, my husband presented me with one of the most romantic and surprising gifts I have ever received. It wasn’t set with diamonds, and it didn’t come with a shiny bell and basket. It was an old book, long separated from its dustjacket. A book I already owned.
When I was 12, I read The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford for the very first time. It’s the story of Linda and her complicated romantic life, as narrated by her cousin Fanny. It’s a comedy about class, family, sex and death, and it affected me deeply. The book brought me comfort and joy. Every time I had an adolescent wobble, I’d reach for it and read it all over again. Mitford’s descriptions of longing and learning resonated keenly with me. No, I wasn’t the aristocratic daughter of an eccentric landowner who refused to educate me properly – but otherwise I was convinced that I was Linda in every way, craving love for love’s sake, and certain that satisfying the craving would lead me to adventures.
Like Linda, I kept making romantic mistakes well into adulthood. I’d throw myself into a brand-new relationship, and hope would triumph over experience every single time. “I think he might be the one,” I’d say, cheerfully ignoring a semaphore alphabet’s worth of red flags. Then Christmas would come around.
I never expected extravagant gifts. All I hoped for was something thoughtful – a present that indicated that the person I had been sleeping with on a regular basis for the past few months had been listening during one of our conversations. Failing that, I would have been delighted with a very small Diptyque candle.
A very sporty boyfriend presented me with tickets to Twickenham, suggesting that I make the next year “the one where you get into rugby”. (I tried to look enthusiastic. I failed. He said he’d take his cousin.) A very posh boyfriend gave me a battered box containing magnolia hand soap and matching moisturiser. I recognised it from his mother’s emergency present cupboard. There was the inevitable red, rash-rousing underwear, the T-shirt promoting protein supplements, and the Michael Bolton CD, which was an inside joke. With a different girlfriend.
I tried to get over it, telling myself I was spoiled, silly and selfish. I should be a modern independent woman! I could buy my own scented candles!
Still, I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that a Christmas gift from your lover could – and should – be romantic. I wanted to be with someone who cared enough to try to make me gasp when I opened their present. After all, that was the energy I was bringing to my Christmas gift-giving. No one was getting socks on my watch.
Christmas 2011 came, and the man I was seeing sent me a slightly disappointing token of his esteem – a text message. At the beginning of 2012, I decided things had to change.
At that point, every Christmas present I had ever been given by a boyfriend had been exactly what I deserved. I had tried so hard to present myself as a cool, casual girl who was not overly troubled by emotions. I had dissembled, because I believed that you had to be cool and casual in order to trick someone into loving you. I didn’t think anyone was going to fancy the real me – a nerdy, passionate, intense bookworm with too many feelings. I’d been lying, and what do liars get? Magnolia soap.
I promised myself that I was going to stop dating in Cool Girl drag, and start showing up exactly as I was, even if no one was interested. Within days of making that decision, I met the man I would marry.
When I lent him my copy of Molly Keane’s dark comedy Good Behaviour, it was a dare. Love me, love my book. It’s the story of a girl with no chill. I thought it might scare him off before things got too serious. Instead, he responded with alacrity – and with Angus Wilson and PG Wodehouse. We bonded over books, and we made each other’s lives and libraries bigger and brighter.
Still, when Christmas came, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe he would give me a book I had never heard of – something he had loved and wanted me to love too. Maybe he would mutter something about “not really doing Christmas” before handing me a badly wrapped box of Matchmakers. Whatever! It wasn’t a big deal. I was cool.
So when he handed me my present, I forced my face into a pre-emptive smile. Then I saw the look in his eyes. The vulnerability, and the hope. This was just a boy, standing in front of a girl, wanting her to know she had inspired him. He had been listening. He had gathered his resources and searched in all the places that Google would allow. It didn’t matter what was in the package. All that mattered is that he had tried, for me.
I tore open the silver paper. He had given me a small, worn, cloth-bound blue book. Old gold words were embossed on the spine: “The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford”. It was a first edition of my favourite book. He hadn’t chosen a gift that was about his tastes, his interests. He wasn’t trying to make me more like him. He knew me, and he knew who I was. What I loved. I had spent my formative years reading that book and searching for answers, running between relationships and struggling to find a way to love with an open, honest heart. Finally, I had come home.
