Gift ideas for female friend As dependable as gifts from Santa and the Nativity story on Christmas mornings growing up was the phone ringing before we were barely out of bed. “Christmas gift!” my grandmother would exclaim when we answered. She lived across the street and would see us later at brunch, where she would serve ham and fresh biscuits. But she often couldn’t wait till then. She had to be the first to say, “Christmas gift!”
The tradition came from her large family, who lived in upstate South Carolina. Back then, in the 1930s and ’40s, the saying was a way to claim the first gift of the day. By the time the custom trickled down to me, there was no particular prize—just the glory of having been first. For years I didn’t question the tradition—I only knew I had to try to beat my grandmother to the saying; I would even sneak over to her house early, ring the doorbell, and, before she could answer, yell, “Christmas gift!” through the glass of the dining room window. She’d appear at the door with a big, exasperated sigh, but I always saw a twinkle in her eye. She loved that I was carrying on the ritual.
Grandma died almost two years ago, and I regret not asking her about a lot of things, including about the origins of “Christmas gift.” Was it just our family? A South Carolina thing? A Southern thing? No one else I knew seemed to do it.
I contacted a couple of Southern linguists who were unfamiliar, too. Then I was introduced to Dr. Michael Montgomery, a University of South Carolina professor emeritus of English and linguistics. Jackpot.
“I can remember [my grandfather] throwing open the door and yelling, Gift ideas for female friend says Montgomery, a Knoxville, Tennessee, native. “It was a pretty indelible memory, even for a small child.”
Although Montgomery says there’s no way to know the exact origin, the Dictionary of American Regional English does claim the usage is chiefly Southern, and cites alternatives such as Christmas box, Christmas give, and Christmas treat. Montgomery is putting together the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Southern Appalachian English, to be published in 2018, and the saying gets its own entry there, too. One of the sources he cites is Jean Thomas’s Blue Ridge Country, a 1942 look at mountain customs that offers this description: “The young folks of the community go from home to home, bursting in with a cheery ‘Christmas gift!’ Those who have been taken unaware, though it happens the same way each year, forgetting, in the pleasant excitement of the occasion, to cry the greeting first, must pay a forfeit of something good to eat—cake, home-made taffy, popcorn, apples, nuts.”
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