I do enjoy Christmas. It’s a fun holiday where there is great food, my family comes into town, and there is great mystery surrounding gift giving. I completely understnand that Christmas has become more about material items than the actual reason we are supposed to celebrate (the birth of Jesus Christ),but one part of the materialistic part of Christmas I do enjoy is what I call the WOW Factor. When I give a gift on Christmas morning, I not only want the recepient to enjoy the gift, but i want their face to show something different from their normal expression – nothing fake but pure and authentic suprise.
Lots of people give me Christmas lists to go off of which is nice and easy for those who don’t want to put in a lot of effort into their gift giving. It’s not that they don’t care, but people are busy or want to make sure that their loved ones get what they want so they just stick to the list. For me it is another area in my life that I like to take a risk, and just like with any risk it can pay off big or you may lose big. However, unlike when you lose money, gift biving is actually fairly safe as long as you got a gift receipt. So for me, it is worth trying to get the WOW out of people than it is playing it safe.
This year I did well with two gifts that both got pretty big WOWs in my opinion. The first was a gift to my brother. He unwrapped the gift and found an M&Ms box inside. At first he didn’t want to open it and actually commented that he wasn’t going to open it because he though I had put custom phrases on the M&Ms that were making fun of him. Once he took the top off of the box, his face lit up as he saw his face on some of the M&Ms and the name Big Willy on the others. This was nothing something he asked for, but he liked it and the custom M&Ms were not something that he was expecting. The other gift that my brother, sister in Law and I did for our Dad that was definately NOT on his list was an iPad. It was the last gift we gave on Christmas morning, but it by far got the biggest WOW factor of the day. We all knew he would enjoy the iPad and was definately not expecting anything like it for Christmas. He coudln’t really believe; at first he thought we had wrapped another gift inside of the iPad box.
Overall, I had a great Christmas and got a few great WOWs out of it. Someday, I hope to get a WOW as big as my brother did last year. It was, by far the biggest WOW i’ve ever seen and got that reaction by multiple people at the same time. I am currently plotting on how to achieve this and it will be legendary!
Do you try to WOW with your Christmas gifts? What is the biggest WOW you’ve gotten or given?