The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
Quick answer: The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: full summary with the ending explained, Della and Jim's characters, themes of love and sacrifice, and the double irony.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents, sixty cents of it in pennies, is all Della Young has saved to buy her husband a Christmas present. From that opening ledger of poverty, O. Henry builds the most famous twist ending in American short fiction. The Gift of the Magi appeared in a New York newspaper in December 1905 and was collected in The Four Million in 1906; it runs about two thousand words and has been assigned, adapted and imitated ever since.
Students arrive at this story needing the plot and the irony; writers come back to it to see how a mechanism this artificial can still produce genuine feeling. The answer lies in how openly O. Henry plays his game. The story tells you it is a parable from the first page, keeps its symmetry in plain sight, and still lands its final paragraph like a benediction.
The story in brief
It is Christmas Eve in a shabby eight-dollar-a-week New York flat. Della and Jim Young are poor, and each owns one treasure: Della's knee-length brown hair, and Jim's gold watch, inherited from his father and grandfather. Desperate to give Jim a present worthy of him, Della sells her hair for twenty dollars and hunts the shops until she finds the perfect gift, a platinum fob chain for the watch, simple and valuable, like Jim himself. She hurries home, curls what remains of her hair, and waits with a prayer that Jim will still find her pretty.
Jim comes in, sees her, and freezes in an expression Della cannot read, not anger, not disapproval, but a kind of stunned arithmetic. He produces his gift: the beautiful tortoiseshell combs, the set Della has worshipped in a Broadway window, bought for hair that no longer exists. Della then offers her chain, and Jim, smiling, tumbles onto the couch and tells her the whole truth: he sold the watch to buy the combs. Each has sacrificed the one treasure that gave the other's gift its meaning. The narrator closes by comparing them to the magi, the wise men who invented Christmas giving, and rules that of all who give gifts, these two foolish children were the wisest. They are the magi.
The characters
Della is the story's engine: impulsive, devoted, vain enough about her hair for the sacrifice to cost something real, which is exactly why it counts. She wants to give a gift that matches her love, not her budget. Jim, seen mostly through Della's eyes, is quiet, tired, twenty-two and carrying a family on twenty dollars a week; his calm at the reveal, no reproach, no drama, just a smile and the suggestion that supper matters more, tells us his love has the same shape as hers. The narrator is a character too, wry and openly opinionated, stepping past the couple at the end to hand down the story's verdict directly.
Themes and meaning
The exam essentials: love and sacrifice, the difference between price and value, and the wisdom of the foolish. Both gifts become useless as objects and priceless as proof; the story argues that a gift's meaning lives in what it costs the giver, not what it does for the receiver. The allusion to the magi frames the couple's mutual folly as the truest form of the original Christmas impulse, and the poverty of the setting matters, since only people with almost nothing can give everything with a single sale.
One sharper note for higher marks: the story is also about knowledge as the final gift. Objects fail, but each spouse ends the evening knowing exactly how much they are loved, with evidence no rich couple could buy. The twist does not defeat the gifts; it upgrades them from things into proof. That reading explains the narrator's verdict better than sentiment does: the magi were wise because they understood what giving is for.
The craft: the double reversal
O. Henry's signature device here is not one twist but two, arranged in mirror symmetry: her sacrifice cancels his gift, his sacrifice cancels hers. The design work happens early. The story plants exactly two treasures, states them side by side in a single paragraph, and lets the reader hold both while following only Della's half of the plot. When Jim's half surfaces, the surprise feels inevitable because the material was in our hands the whole time. That is the honest twist: withheld action, never withheld information about the world's rules.
Study also how the story manages its reveal through Jim's face, described before it is explained, buying a full page of suspense between his entrance and the truth. And notice the narrator's tonal control, ironic about the flat, the imitation gold, the sobs and powder rag, then suddenly plain and grave in the final paragraph. Writers building twist stories should copy the discipline rather than the sentiment: two setups, total symmetry, and information played fair. It is the same structural fairness that Storytelling and Structure marks reward in Writory's Short Story Contest when it opens in September 2026.
Lines that carry it
The opening, "One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all," does more than state poverty; the fragment rhythm makes the reader count alongside Della, and the story earns its emotion from bookkeeping before it spends a single tear.
And the closing judgement that these "two foolish children" who "most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house" are in fact the wisest gives the story its title and its thesis in one breath, folly and wisdom declared to be the same act viewed from different heights.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, define the irony precisely: situational irony doubled, since each gift is made useless by the other's sacrifice.
- Cite the two treasures, hair and watch, as paired symbols, and note they are introduced together early, which is the twist playing fair.
- Link the title to the allusion: the magi began Christmas giving, and the narrator ranks Della and Jim among them.
- Writers: plant every fact a twist needs in the first third, and hide only actions, never rules.
- Watch how Jim's unreadable expression buys suspense; delaying explanation of a reaction is cheaper and stronger than delaying the event.
- Do not sneer at the sentiment; the story controls it with irony until the last paragraph, which is why the last paragraph works.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which two characters each secretly give up the thing that makes the other's plan for them work, a duet partner sells the piano while the pianist buys sheet music, a friend cancels the trip the other has quit a job to take. Reveal the two sacrifices within a page of each other, and end on what the cancellation proves rather than what it costs.
Questions
What is the irony in The Gift of the Magi?
It is a double situational irony: Della sells her hair to buy a chain for Jim's watch, while Jim sells the watch to buy combs for Della's hair. Each gift is made useless by the very sacrifice that paid for it, yet the sacrifices prove the love the gifts were meant to express.
What happens at the end of The Gift of the Magi?
Jim reveals he sold his watch to buy Della's combs, just as she sold her hair to buy his watch chain. He suggests they put the gifts away and have supper, and the narrator declares that of all who give gifts, these two are the wisest: they are the magi.
Why are Della and Jim compared to the magi?
The magi were the wise men whose presents to the infant Christ began the tradition of Christmas giving. O. Henry argues that Della and Jim, who gave up their greatest treasures for each other, understand the spirit of giving better than anyone, which makes their foolishness the highest wisdom.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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