With Thanksgiving behind us, we have entered the season of gift-giving.

We published a letter from one of our readers last week, Elaine Doremus, who advocated making gifts or sharing experiences instead of buying.

Doremus herself shared some wise insights as well as some how-to advice.

“When we buy new items, we may want to be aware of how our actions affect the planet,” she wrote.

We have a picture in this week’s edition of our congressman visiting a restaurant in Guilderland to promote supporting small businesses in the holiday season.

We publish many letters this time of year from worthwhile charitable groups seeking gifts.

The first Christmas gifts were of course from the magi. The story, as told in Matthew, describes them following a star to Bethlhem to find the baby Jesus. They brought him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

One of our favorite stories since childhood was written by O. Henry soon after the turn of the last century — “The Gift of the Magi.”

It tells of a poor young couple on Christmas Eve; they live in furnished rooms that cost $8 a week. Della has saved for months to buy a present worthy of her husband, Jim.

She cries on Christmas Eve because she has only $1.87. She also has hair “more beautiful than any queen’s jewels and gifts.”

Della goes to a wigmaker and has her hair shorn for $20. She spends the money — all of it — on a gold watch chain for Jim’s prize possession, his heirloom pocket watch. “Jim and the chain both had quietness and value.”

When Jim comes home that night, he gives Della the hair combs she had so admired but knew they could never afford. “I sold the watch to get the money to buy the combs,” he tells her.

The story concludes: “The magi, as you know, were wise men — wonderfully wise men — who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones.

“And here I have told you the story of two children who were not wise. Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for the other. But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days: Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the magi.”

So why were Della and Jim the most wise? Each cared enough for the other to sacrifice what was most valuable to them.

The heart of that story has more to do with the value of caring — caring so much you would sacrifice your most prized possession — than it does about the material possessions, which of course are worthless: a chain with no watch, hair combs with no hair.

I thought of that this week when a long-retired teacher called to tell me she had gotten “a gift.”

Being a sharing person, she wanted me to write about the gift. Being a humble person, she did not want me to use her name. So I will simply call her Teacher.

She had taught generations of students at Lynnwood Elementary School in Guilderland and retired years ago. I had written about some of the wonderful projects she spearheaded.

Teacher does not have an internet presence. She calls, or writes letters by hand.

Last week, I received an email from someone named Rashida, who was in Teacher’s fourth-grade class in 1990. Rashida had done a Google search, trying to find Teacher and came across a story I’d written about her.

“I have thought about her on many occasions throughout the years,” Rashida wrote of Teacher. “She planted the travel seed in me early, and I want to share with her the impact she’s had on my life.”

Rashida asked if I could connect her with Teacher. I called Teacher and read Rashida’s email to her.

The next day, Teacher called me. She was excited to tell me all of the many places Rashida had traveled, literally from A to Z — from Australia to Zanzibar.

Teacher named dozens of countries her long-ago student has visited.

“Hearing from Rashida was a gift,” she said.

Teacher had brought to class things from her own travels and shared them with her students. She told them, for example, about bartering in Morocco.

“Americans don’t travel that much,” she said and recalled asking her class how many had been to another country. She was thrilled when a lot of hands went up.

But then she discovered the children who raised their hands had been to Disney World — not to real places around the world.

Teacher said she had been crestfallen after the November presidential election — “knocked down” by the results is how she put it — but her talk with Rashida had uplifted her.

She has turned off the relentless churning of news on her television to keep her blood pressure down.

“We can be kind to one another,” she said.

Teacher read me a letter she had drafted to Kamala Harris — “I’m obsessing about my notepaper,” she confided.

“Dear Vice President Harris,” she read. “Your campaign brought me joy. I’m an elderly Black woman. I’m glad I lived long enough to see you run ….”

Just as Rashida’s call had uplifted Teacher, Teacher’s call uplifted me.

I was reminded of a psychology study that was published a half-century ago, when I was a college student. The behavioral scientists, John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, used students at the Princeton Theological Seminary as their subjects.

Each student was to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan. The set-up was that some of the students had plenty of time while others were short on time to give their sermon. Each student, on the way to deliver the sermon, had to walk through a narrow alley where an actor portrayed a poor man who had fallen.

The results were stunning. Most of the students who were “early” stopped to help the stranger. But only 10 percent who were “late” stopped to help with the vast majority stepping over the stranger on their way to deliver a sermon about the Good Samaritan.

Irony aside, what has stuck with me all these years is that the single most important determinant — more than any of the theology students’ beliefs — was how much time each thought he had.

In an era — even more so than a half-century ago when the study was conducted — when there is so much rushing about, so much busy-ness, so much information coming at us from so many sources, we need to give ourselves the time to see the needs of the people around us.

Maybe do what Teacher has done and turn away from our screens long enough to “be kind to one another.”

“It’s like I’m in a boat,” she said, “not a sturdy, flat-bottomed rowboat, but more like a tippy canoe and I’m trying to keep myself afloat,” said Teacher. “Our conversation put me on a lake — the water is smooth and we’re in the sunshine.”

This is a gift each of us can give to one another. It doesn’t have to be at Christmastime; it doesn’t have to do with a religion at all.

It is simply the gift of connecting with and caring about one another — any time, anywhere, all year long.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor