She Never Wanted This Present – But It Reminded Her of the Greatest Gift

Published: December 19, 2024

She Never Wanted This Present – But It Reminded Her of the Greatest Gift

By Movieguide® Contributor

All 16-year-old Kristin Chenoweth wanted for Christmas was Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans, but what she got was much more meaningful.

“Something about those jeans got ahold of my imagination and wouldn’t let go. I had to have them!” the Teddy Bear Award® winner recalled.

“My parents wanted to make my older brother, Mark, and me happy, but they also knew what was best for us. Like when Mark had his heart set on a set of big tires for his truck one Christmas…and what did he get? Contacts. For his eyes,” she remembered. “What a disappointment. Ah, contacts. It became a kind of joke between the two of us when something didn’t go our way.”

Though gifts like contacts received an eye-roll from the actress and her brother, Chenoweth was and is grateful for her parents, who adopted her when she was an infant.

“Mom happened to be in the same hospital, having just had a hysterectomy, with no hope of conceiving the daughter she and Dad wanted so badly. That she managed to connect with my birth mother, whose original plans of adoption had just fallen through, seemed like God’s will,” she said.

“Mom and Dad worked hard to give Mark and me all the wonderful things we had and the opportunity to do all the things we loved. I don’t think I could ever thank them enough,” she said. “Every Christmas, there were the stockings Mom filled — and still does — with little necessities: a cool new toothbrush, hair ties, that silly razor I wanted, some hand sanitizer (these days). Our stockings were hand-knit with our names on top and jingle bells.”

“Our high school didn’t have a big arts program back then, so the only way I could make my mark as a performer was dancing on the pom-pom squad. I was a Tigette, cheering on the Broken Arrow Tigers. Go, team!”

“Our colors were black and gold. Maybe that’s why I wanted those jeans so badly,” she continued. “So I would stand out.”

That year, she waited and waited for Christmas to come. And finally, it did.

“After church on Christmas morning, we ate the breakfast you had to eat if you lived in Oklahoma: grits, sausage, eggs and toast. We opened our stockings, then finally settled down to hand out the big presents from under the tree.”

“My box looked big, easily big enough for a pair of jeans, maybe two pairs. Could I be that lucky? I had butterflies in my stomach,” she recalled.

She opened the box but was disappointed to find something else.

It was “a Tigette letter jacket, black and gold with ‘Kristi’ (that’s what I went by in those days!) stitched on the front and my graduation year on the sleeve,” she said. “Those butterflies in my stomach flew away real fast. Oh, I knew the jacket was a big deal: made to order and expensive.”

“And we weren’t a rich family,” she continued. “Mom later told me how the company had insisted that the size was too small even for a super petite 16-year-old; she must have it wrong. No, Mom insisted, she really is four foot eleven. (Still am — did I mention that?)”

She knew it was something that she would need and it was a big moment, but she still felt disappointed.

“‘Wow, thanks so much,’ I said, trying to hide my disappointment. Ah, contacts, the phrase flew through my head. I put on the jacket. A perfect fit.”

“I knew that you should never refuse a gift,” she said. “You had to receive it, to honor the givers, my dear parents who’d given me so much. I felt guilty and grateful all at once.”

As she processed her feelings, she noticed her family’s nativity creche.

“I saw our crèche and God’s son asleep in the manger. He too had the perfect adoptive parents of sorts, whom God had entrusted him to, Mary and Joseph, standing over him,” she said. “At once something happened inside me, disappointment becoming transformed and transforming me in the process.”

“Jesus wasn’t the Messiah — the gift — that many people expected. Not that king who would reign from a palace, the powerful figure Herod feared would lead mighty armies with his sword,” she continued. “He was but an infant born to a mere carpenter and his teenage bride from the tiny town of Nazareth, a poor speck on the map in Galilee. A humble couple who traveled by donkey to Bethlehem, lodging in a stable because there was no room for people like them at the inn — I could hear Dad read the words — wrapping their baby in swaddling clothes and laying him in a manger.”

And the first people to visit him were shepherds, who were of low status.

“The light of the universe did come, a child who would indeed grow up to change the world but through love and compassion and understanding and a sacrificial death that defied all expectations,” Chenoweth said. “On that first Christmas, Jesus entered our world in so humble a way that no one could have imagined it. Yet he was the gift all mankind needed.”

“I grew up that Christmas when I was 16. I learned that what is given in love should be accepted with love. How proud I was wearing that jacket on campus; how I treasured it over the years,” she said. “After the career I’ve had — beyond my expectations — I gave it to the Broken Arrow Performing Arts Center, which has honored it and me by displaying it in a glass cabinet for all to see, worn by the Tigette who went on to bigger stages and wider screens.”

“Ever since that Christmas, I’ve tried to look at what seem like disappointments differently. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. Sometimes what you get is even better. A blessing, in fact,” she said. “A disappointment can be the way you are shown the direction you are meant to go in, not necessarily the one you want. Sometimes disappointments morph into miracles.”

Chenoweth has been a believer since she was young and occasionally speaks about her faith.

“God was a huge part of my life and how I found my gift was through church music,” she previously told TODAY.

In a Guideposts article she wrote, “I pray all the time. Sometimes I think I pray too much, if that’s possible.”