Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.

Writing inspired by the following Secret Santa Story Share 2024 prompt:

‘Are you sure this is meant for me?’
Tell the story of an accidental gift, given to the wrong person.

A Chain of Books

by Jasmine Fassl

It was a small box, wrapped in brown parcel paper, with brown string. Dora stood in the post office, puzzled. She’d just picked up this parcel after she received a notification slip in her mailbox, but could not imagine who might have sent it to her. She hadn’t ordered anything online in weeks. The parcel did not have any logos or company stickers on it. Only her name and address. Dora shook her head. She could not just leave it here, so she decided to take it home.

Dora’s mind was on other things as she made her way to her flat. She slipped out of her shoes as soon as she closed the front door behind her and put the kettle on. She tidied away the few groceries and finally sat down, tea in hand, and turned her full attention to the parcel.

She unknotted the string and carefully pried away the sticky tape, then the brown paper. Inside was a cardboard box wrapped in bubble wrap, and inside that she found the most beautiful edition of The Secret Garden she had ever seen. Dora carefully looked through the pages of the weighty hardback book, taking out maps of Mistlethwaite and postcards of birds, botanical drawings of flowers and paintings of the young characters. She war stunned.

Who had sent her this book? Was it even meant for her? She checked the box again, but there was no note, no clue at all, as to who the mysterious sender might be.
She had loved this book as a child, read it over and over again, borrowed from the library. It transported her to a simpler time in her life. She started reading it immediately, sipping her tea as she fell into the story once more.

Over the next few days Dora told the story of the mysterious parcel with the precious book to friends, family and colleagues at work, and though everybody was amazed, nobody owned up to sending it to her.

The following Saturday morning, Dora was browsing her local charity shops when she saw a leather-bound copy of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. She’d read some of them when she was a teenager, but she was never a big fan. Yet it put her in mind of the unexpected gift of The Secret Garden and the joy she’d felt receiving it. She also remembered that her mother’s neighbour, Anne, was a huge fan of the books. Dora’s mum told her that Anne had just been to London to the Sherlock Holmes museum at 221b Baker Street, and Anne had made her sit through all her holiday snaps taken on her phone upon her return. Dora bought the book and then rushed home, found the plain cardboard box which had carried The Secret Garden and packaged up the Sherlock Holmes book. She made it to the post office, just before it closed.

Dora did not mention the Sherlock Holmes book, or the secretive parcel to anyone.

—

Anne knocked on her neighbour, Fred’s, door. She’d received a slip in her letterbox, saying that the postie had missed her, but her parcel was at number 17. Her parcel? She wasn’t expecting anything. She hadn’t ordered anything, as far as she could remember.
Fred was out, so she didn’t get her parcel until the next morning. When she took it in and opened it, she was quite surprised to find a beautiful edition of the Collected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes inside. Where on earth had this come from?

She opened the book carefully. It had that old book smell – a combination of paper, ink and the glue holding it all together. The foxing on the edges gave it an old-world look and the leather cover was embossed with gold letters. Anne found it hard to put it down, and regretted she had to get to work.
Anne’s colleagues had been patient with her recently. There are only so many holiday snaps people will tolerate, and Anne’s recent holiday in London had pushed them towards the socially acceptable limit. They simply did not care to hear about more Sherlock Holmes related stories, even though they had to admit that a mysterious parcel was quite strange. And even fitted in with the writing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous detective!

Reading this beautiful copy of the book, brought lots of pleasure to Anne, though all the sleuthing to find out where the mysterious object might have come from topped it easily. Try as she might, she couldn’t figure it out – it seemed to have appeared out of thin air. But the whole affair had left her energised and excited. Somebody clearly knew she loved Sherlock Holmes and went to some trouble to give her a precious gift.

After finishing the book, she found herself on the lookout for more books like it in a local bookshop. She asked the bookseller for a recommendation and came away with three books. On her way out of the store she walked past a table with signed copies of books. Anne stopped to have a closer look at the available titles. The bookseller came up behind her, carrying another pile of books – these were from an author event with Viennese author Eva Menasse, which had taken place the night before. The bookseller told Anne how long the signing queue had been and how lovely the author had treated all of the readers at the event, chatting to every single one. Anne picked the book from the top of the pile and looked it over. When she opened it, she noticed that the author had written ‘To Samuel’ on the title page. She pointed this out to the bookseller who laughed and shook her head. She said that the author was so engrossed in a conversation about Samuel Beckett, that she’d signed the book ‘To Samuel’ instead of to the customer standing in front of her. The book must have gotten mixed into the pile of signed stock at the end accidentally.

Jokingly, the bookseller inquired if Anne didn’t maybe know somebody named ‘Samuel’, which made Anne laugh at the improbably of it. But then she remembered her cousin Frank’s son. He had just moved to take up a teaching position at the University of Tromsø in Norway, the most northerly university in the world. The delighted bookseller gifted the book to Anne to send on. It was clearly meant for a ‘Samuel’, so why not one who was now living in the Arctic – it was nearly Christmas after all.

Back at home, Anne found the cardboard box which her puzzling Sherlock Holmes book had arrived in. She wrapped the signed book up in bubble wrap, looked up the address of the university online and dropped it at the post office the very next day.

—

Samuel had just arrived at his new office. The snow and polar night’s darkness would take some time getting used to, it was quite a change from his native Austria, though he felt comfortable in his wood-panelled office. He stamped the snow from his boots on the mat by the door and hung up his coat on the rack. This was the last day before the Christmas break and he looked forward to catching up with some email correspondence before heading to the faculty’s Yuletide drinks reception. He had to stay in Norway over the holidays, having only just got here, there was no point in travelling all that way South for only a couple days again. But he missed his family and friends, and all the Austrian Christmas traditions.

He sat down on the chair and noticed a parcel wrapped in brown paper sitting there, waiting. He was intrigued, as he wasn’t expecting anything…