I love gift giving! Very little thrills me more than finding the “perfect” gift. Unfortunately that seems rare. A “perfect” gift is something that says something about the other person. It is something that will be long lasting, at least in the memory. It is a rare and precious. So it doesn’t happen every year with every person on my list.
One person on my list is difficult to buy for. He’s picky and unpredictable about what he would like. He says he doesn’t want anything most of the time, and when he does have a request, it is practical. For example, this year he has asked for this: 
Not very exciting! It doesn’t say anything about him except that he is tired of cheap trimmers.
So sometimes gift giving is practical, and that’s okay. It’s not a perfect gift, but as I said, perfect gifts are rare. Maybe they come along only a few times in life.
When I around ten or eleven, I asked for something very odd – not for Christmas or my birthday. It was something I wanted dearly, so I asked and my daddy gave it to me. This gift ended up being one of the best gifts I ever received.
It was a hay bale. It was a perfect gift!
Being one of three sisters sharing a bedroom, I longed for a place of my own. The hay bale served that purpose. It became my retreat, where I did homework, where I dreamed looking up into the expansive sky, where I thought about God, where I cried, and where I wondered about the future.
It was a perfect gift because my daddy didn’t laugh or dismiss my desire as silly or a passing whim. He went out in the field and brought it home, put it down outside the backyard. It was for me. Even as a kid, it meant more to me than just having a hay bale. It meant love and validation – the perfect gift.
A Cup of Grace 