From the beginning of the story we meet Della – the very first character of the story “The gift of the Magi“. Della is supposedly a housewife and, in spite of their apartment being quite poor, she does her work quite well. Della is really thrifty and depicted realistically because she understands the harsh reality and saves one or two pennies by “bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied”. This is, by all means, a case of metaphor. Della doesn’t just demanding or asking or even begging, she is “bulldozing” like a powerful vehicle. But, despite this, she is a romantic woman. Della sacrifices her greatest possession to buy a present for the most important person in her life – Jim. The author uses a simile here to describe her hair, it is “like a cascade of brown waters”, it is so wavy and smooth. It doesn’t even matter that she is wearing her “old brown jacket, old brown hat”. Della is still having a “brilliant sparkle in her eyes”. Her exploit is described as “generosity added to love – “a mammoth task” – a case of hyperbole, which is used to show her love to Jim and her ability to take serious decisions. She is really proud of herself. She always wanted to look nice for Jim. Della is rather pious: “she had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things”.

One more character that we meet in this story is Madame Sofronie. O. Henry provides a bright and complete characterization with only one sentence: "Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the 'Sofronie. She is blunt: when Della asks whether she would buy her hair, she says, "I buy hair" and brusquely tells Della to take her hat off so she can see it. She offers Della twenty dollars for her hair.

Mr. James Dillingham, Della’s husband, at home called Jim is the only provider for their family. But Della doesn’t view him only like that; she sees him as a person and cares about him very much: “he needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves”. She thinks that he worth the best Christmas present ever and gave him a platinum fob chain to show that she was cognizant of things that were valuable for him. Jim is always punctual – he is never late. He is rather serious and discreet. It is described with the help of simile: “as immovable as a setter”. He is proud of his watch but at the end of the story we see that Della and her beauty are much more precious for him. He is really shocked to see Della with a short haircut that he even doesn’t notice his present.

For me, who loves this story very much for a long time, they are the real Magi, who live  in the real world and at the real time, they are much higher of reality, and there is even something divine in them.