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I don't know about you, but I find this time of year just a little bit stressful. It's not the constant Santa ads on TV. It's not the long, dark days. It's the pressure to give the perfect gift to everyone you love.

If you celebrate the holidays at all, it can be totally nerve-wracking. What if my BFF's enthusiasm for tinned French sardines doesn't match mine? And what if I spend too much money, or worse yet, too little, on my office's white elephant gift? What if my brother doesn't like the whiskey stones I got him? I mean, that's just a joke. Please don't get your brother whiskey stones. Trust me.

On this episode, we have two stories about giving gifts and what you receive in return. Oh, and don't worry, even though one story mentions Santa, it doesn't reveal any of the big guy's secrets. First up, Stephanie Garibaldi, who told this at a Moth Story Slam in Washington, D.C. Here's Stephanie, live at the Moth. I have always hated visiting the mall Santa.

As a shy kid, I much preferred writing a letter. It seemed much more civilized than sitting on a strange man's lap and making demands. My parents would drag me anyway, and when Santa would invariably ask what I wanted for Christmas, I would just mumble something like, "Whatever you have in this sleigh is fine."

As a parent, it wasn't any better. You waited in a huge line to pay a huge amount of money for a photo of your kid sitting on a stranger's lap, either grimacing, fake smiling, or worse, out and out crying. So I was pretty relieved when I thought that my daughter at age nine had maybe outgrown the whole visiting Santa thing. So I just didn't take her that year.

Only imagine my horror, three days before Christmas, she says, "Mom, I need to tell Santa something. Can you bring me to him?"

Okay, as a single mom, I have already gotten her whatever presents I'm gonna manage to get her. They're neatly wrapped, ribbons and bows, and they're hidden away ready for Christmas morning. So I'm kind of panicking because, you know, she's gonna make some big request of like the hot toy that you can't get anymore three days before Christmas. This is not good. So I try a strategy. I say, you know, I'm in pretty tight with Santa, so why don't you tell me and I'll pass it along to Santa.

But she says, "No, this is so important. I need to tell him face to face."

So we take her two days before Christmas. The line is longer than ever. We finally get up to the front, and she jumps right up there, and it's like she is ready for that first question. He says, so have you been a good girl this year? And she's like, oh, yes, I've been very good. So good that you're probably going to bring me a lot of presents. But here's the thing, Santa, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. See, I learned this year there are lots of kids who don't have very many toys, right?

Yeah, in fact, some kids don't even have a bedroom of their own or a parent. You know, I'm lucky because I have three parents. I have my mom and my grandparents. So, you know, I just, I want you to take all the toys that you were going to bring to me and give them to kids who need them more. I got to tell you, I am trying to lose it like a fool in the mall Santa's line. I...

All my fears, you know, when you're a single mom and she has to go to aftercare after school and she's spending so many hours with a stranger, you think she's not getting good values. And you don't have those dreams that these fancy schmancy two-parent families have. You don't think things like, my kid could be the president one day. No, you just kind of hope and pray that she'll become a decent human being. And we haven't even talked about this. So she's come up with this out of her own heart.

And I am floored. And then I saw something I've never seen before. Santa's taking it pretty hard too because I see him wipe a tear away from his cheek. And he gets himself together. He kind of harrumps a little bit. And then he says, well, it's a privilege to honor such a request. And I will. He said, but I think I can also find a few extra gifts for a sweet girl like you in my bed. So I'll bring you something too.

And she's happy, and she says, thank you, Santa. And she reaches up and gives him this big hug. And we're making it off to the car. And she holds my hand on the way to the car. I'm still trying to get myself together. I'm speechless still. And I put her in her little car seat in the back. Because even though she's nine, she's tiny. And she still fits in one of these car seats. And we're heading off from Anne Arundel Mills. And I get onto 295. And that's when I've kind of gotten myself together enough. And I...

I take a deep breath and I just glance in the rearview mirror briefly at her because I don't want to risk injuring this beautiful future Nobel Peace Prize winning person. So, just glance and I say, "You know, that was a really kind thing that you asked Santa for. It made me very proud." And she said, "Oh, I didn't mean it." So, yeah.

So I hit the brakes and I go off onto the shoulder of 295, even though you're not supposed to. Just so I can turn in my seat and say, excuse me? I'm sorry, what did you just say? And she said, well, as you know, I haven't been very good this year. So I thought, yeah, I thought...

asked Santa to give my gifts to other kids that he would be fooled and think that I'm this amazing kid and he would bring me gifts anyway. And then she says, and it worked. All of a sudden, she's gone from like modern day Mother Teresa to Machiavelli. I have

I am so upset that I've only had like 15 minutes to relish in the joy of this moment before it was cruelly ripped away from me. And part of me, I'm not gonna lie, part of me is proud because she thought of this, you know? A bigger part of me is concerned and also she's missed the big picture and she has bet on the wrong horse not understanding the Santa mother thing. So...

I think to myself what I should do. If I was a responsible mother, what I would do when I get home, I'm going to unwrap all those presents I got for her, and I'm going to give them to other children, and I'm going to take pictures of those other children, and I'm going to wrap those pictures in an empty box. That would teach her, right? Then maybe she'd have the value she needs to. But who has the time?

And the energy to do that when you're a single mom. So I vowed that I would talk to her later and the later never came. And you know what? We had a pretty good Christmas that year. That was Stephanie Garibaldi. Stephanie describes herself as the hardest working story coach in the DC metro area. Maybe even the world.

As the director of Story Extreme, she runs monthly storytelling shows in Alexandria while teaching classes all over. Speaking of the perfect gift, my favorite gift of all time was my cork-fetching half-Siamese cat, Cleo. A present from my then-boyfriend and now-husband, Charles, she popped out of a wet cardboard box one December night and sealed the deal. Rest in peace, Cleo.

On the theme of gratitude, I'd be remiss not to mention that the gift of story always fits. I work for The Moth. What else can I say? We're in the midst of our year-end donation drive. So if any of The Moth stories have touched you and you want to share them with other people, you can support our mission by going to themoth.org or text GIVE24, with no space in between, to 78679.

Your support helps us bring storytelling workshops to students and community groups around the country. Once again, that's themoth.org or text GIVE24 with no space in between to 78679. Next up, here's Justin Werfel, who told this at a Story Slam in Boston. Two to one. That was the score. My father is not an easy man to give presents to. It's not that he doesn't like surprises. It's more that he doesn't like...

anything. And he's not shy about saying so. So while the rest of my family is all gathered around exchanging gifts, you know, trying to share with our loved ones the things that we found for them that we thought would delight them, my dad opens a present and says, "Oh, why'd you waste your money on this? I don't want it." Which isn't such an easy thing to hear when you're, you know, six. But you get used to it. Which doesn't mean that you stop trying. My sister and I had a running competition.

Throughout our whole lives, we kept track of how many presents each of us had gotten for him that he'd actually liked. And the lifetime score was two to one. To be fair, he was always very clear about what he actually wanted. And that was a sports car, which I think is the traditional present you get for a child for their parent, if you're the emperor of the 12 kingdoms.

I mean, it's obviously he didn't expect to get one as a present, but you know, from his point of view, it was like, why would he want some other thing that he didn't want? So we would get him things that we could, that we thought he would like, and he would vocally not want them. That was the system. There was one time when I was like, I was probably seven or eight, I went into a Hallmark store, and they used to sell these little cardboard jigsaw puzzles, like 100 pieces in a square little box. Like there was a section of the store devoted to these.

Which actually, now that I'm looking back on this and saying this out loud, strikes me as really kind of strange. Like, 100-piece jigsaw puzzles, that's a really specific niche audience. I mean, you've got to be enough of a control freak to enjoy setting things in order for recreation, but also too impatient for something that's going to take you more than a couple of minutes. Anyway, I used to be really into these. I had a whole collection.

And so I went to the store that day and went to the inexplicable little cardboard puzzle section to see what they had. And oh my God, there was a puzzle there with a photograph of a red Ferrari. And in big letters on the box, it said, your very own sports car, some assembly required. Perfect.

I could not wait for the next gift-giving occasion to come around. And when it did, my dad opened the carefully wrapped package I gave him and he looked at it and said, "Oh, why'd you get me this?" And it may have been that some disappointment showed in my face 'cause he handed it back to me and he said, "Here, you take it. You'll use it." I didn't really.

You know, a few years ago, I was thinking about this puzzle. Like, it was just, it was so symptomatic. You know, of all of the things that I got him over the years that he couldn't stand, like, that one might have been the best. It was just, it was so ideal in so many ways. And it turned out that I wasn't the only one thinking about it. Like, a month later, I was visiting home, and my dad just started talking about it out of the blue, totally unprompted. And the reason this is so weird is, like, aside from the coincidence of both of us thinking about it around the same time,

My dad has the worst memory. Like he just absolutely remembers nothing. So for him to suddenly start talking about this present after a quarter of a century means that it must have really made an impact on him. And it had. What he said was, you remember that puzzle of the sports car you got me? That was the worst present ever.

And I said, "No, that was the best present. That was your little son who loves you trying to get you something to please you." He said, "Okay, I get it." I said, "No, you don't. That was the thing you were always saying you wanted. That was me finding a way to make it come true." He said, "Okay, I get it." I said, "No, that was connecting my interests to yours, which is a thing you've spent my entire life saying you want to do." Like I said, I'd just been thinking about this.

And eventually, I actually got him to change his mind about it, which is yet another thing that never happens. But in this case, eventually he came around to thinking that actually was a good present after all. And what a shame in the way he received it. What a lost opportunity. Well, I've always been organized.

And, you know, when I grew up and moved out, over time, most of the stuff got moved out of my room. But a lot of it really just got moved down to the basement. So that night, I went down to the basement, and I found my old little chest of drawers, and I opened the bottom drawer where I kept my puzzle collection, and there it was, you know, where I'd put it, when he gave it back. So when the next gift-giving occasion came around, my dad opened the carefully wrapped package I gave him, and this time, he got it. He keeps it on his desk now. It's the first thing he sees every time he sits down.

That was Justin Werfel. Justin is a research scientist at Harvard, where he studies collective intelligence in systems from robots to termites. His work has had the rare honor of being denounced by a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury as, quote, an enemy of the human race. That's it for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, please know that listening to us is the greatest gift we could ask for.

Christina Norman is the chief creative officer at The Moth. She's excited to expand the world of The Moth and empower more storytellers everywhere. She lives in Brooklyn, and you can find her most Saturday mornings in Prospect Park with her husband and her Ridgeback, Pepper.

This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Ginness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Leanne Gulley, and Patricia Ureña. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.