What was the best Christmas gift you have ever received - and why?

There was a Christmas bazaar--a pretty big one--in Seattle (where I still live). I was about 4. I was walking along the craft booths and saw a stall where a hippie guy (though I was too young to know what a hippie even looked like) was selling dolls and animal figures he'd made and sewed himself. I must have looked interested in the owl he was selling, because he abruptly wrapped it up in a piece of tissue paper, thrust it over to me, and said "Here kid, it's yours". When my parents found out about it, they went to try and give him money for it but he wouldn't take any. That generosity completely blew me away when I was 4, and I wonder whatever happened to that guy. I named the owl Seymour and I recently passed him along to my small niece. When she's a little older there's a story to go along with it.

Playstation 2: W/ MetalGearSolid2 & FinalFantasy 10

a really crappy pinball machine. I begged and begged for this thing and there is was Christmas morning. I was so psyched. I played it every day during Xmas break...until...a weel later, a little plastic part inside just snapped into pieces and that was it. I couldn't even launch balls anymore. It was one big piece of worthless junk, but it was the greatest gift up until then.

A red rider BB gun, the one I got the previous christmas had lasted only 9 months so I had been without for 3 months.

Binoculars.. because for the first time I got what I really really really wanted, and they were good ones..not pink plastic ones with my little pony stamped on the side which is the kind of gift girls normally get.. Dumbed down gifts for girls ought to be outlawed.

Watching my sons face light up when he comes out xmas morning and sees all the gifts.

things and ornamints my children made at school. they r grown now and those grand babies talking to me , so i just love getting phone calls christmas moring , because i live 8 hours away and have remarried,

A teddy bear when I was 6. It was a white, cuddly, polar bear. I still have it.

A proposal of marriage :)