To start, I wasn't sure what to expect to receive from my Reddit Secret Santa. I had never been a part of a Secret Santa exchange before, let alone on Reddit. I had sent my Secret Santa a few shirts from various places which totaled more than $100 worth of merchandise, but I never found out if they received the gifts I sent them.

That last part made me nervous while waiting for my present. The tracking number I was given didn't work on top of that. A few thoughts went through my mind when I tried multiple times to get the tracking number to work.

“Is this a fake number? Is this a scam? Did I get sent a crate?”

I didn't want to believe any of those thoughts, so I checked my old metal mailbox for any packages every day for 10 days, but to no avail. I barely received any mail in that time other than junk mail, bills and Harvey’s burger coupons.

Then, my gift from my Secret Santa arrived on Dec. 30. I was on the way to the grocery store when I saw the mail-woman, dressed in the standard blue and red Canada Post jacket, carrying a small box two blocks down the street while dropping off some letters to the locksmith and the Papa John’s in the new shopping plaza across from the grocery store. I knew it was my present.

By the time I got back home, I saw it. The mail-woman had stuffed my gift, a small brown box shaped like a book, into the mailbox. I went inside and opened it as soon as I got inside my small house. I’m renting it right now from my mother. It used to be my grandmother’s house. My grandmother, who had lived there since 1973, had died last June due to a bowel rupture.

Once I was inside and placed my groceries for the next day or two in the fridge, I ripped open the box slowly. Once I got it open, I found out the reason why the tracking number didn't work was because it was shipped directly from Barnes and Noble. I didn't even know there was a Barnes and Noble located in Canada before then. The main bookstores here are Indigo and Chapter’s.

Inside the box was a medium-sized brown leather-bound journal, along with a receipt with my Secret Santa’s name on the top of it (who I would later Google search to find out who I was matched with) and a few wine coupons from the store. As I looked through the journal, I could tell my Secret Santa put thought into my gift. There are 250 old-fashion coloured pages inside the journal, each of them waiting for someone to write word after word on them like a canvas. The journal was also closed up beforehand by a long leather string, spun around the book three times. The string has to be at least three feet long. It’s actually hanging over my desk as I write this. I could tell my Secret Santa put a lot of thought into my present, as I’m a journalism student and enjoy writing news stories, feature stories and so forth.

When I first joined the Reddit Secret Santa Exchange, I thought I was going to get just some small little gift or a t-shirt of some kind. I also joined it to give a lucky person a nice gift, as I knew that once my Grandmother died, Christmas wouldn't be the same, both in terms of my family life and what gifts I received. A lot of the presents I had gotten in the past were paid for by my grandmother. According to my mother, she never spent a cent of her money over the years on herself. My Grandmother was also the person I was able to tell almost anything to.

When she died, my life started to go into a tailspin. I started to fight with my mother more often because we both had no one to talk to about our personal issues, I moved into her house, started suffering from depression, started getting overwhelmed in my journalism program to the point where I almost failed two classes (which actually made everyone in my program feel better because I am usually a straight-A student in my journalism courses), tried to commit suicide two times in three months, went to the hospital twice (the second time, right before Christmas, I was finally given a proper medication prescription for my Asperger’s Syndrome and depression, but they refused to give me a mental evaluation unless I stayed in the hospital for four weeks due to the doctors all being on vacation, so I don’t know if there’s anything else I don’t know about), got in multiple family fights and had a lot of difficulty paying my bills and buying food every month.

But to get to the point, this gift I received from my Reddit Secret Santa is probably the best present I got for Christmas this year. Sure, I got a 50-inch 4K HDTV from my mother, but it’s hard to be happy about a TV when you already have a PlayStation 4, Xbox One, two desktop computers, a 37-inch HDTV in my office and a bunch of other stuff I've gotten from both my Grandmother and mother over the years or was able to buy before with my birthday money. And that’s just the stuff I see around me right now. This year, because I already have everything possible, I wasn't sure what I wanted to get from anyone.

Before this semester ended, I was very close to dropping out of my program because I wasn't sure if I was making the right choice. I had lost my passion to write news articles, work on radio and television stories and everything in-between. I didn't get to finish my final feature article for a hockey magazine (which was the only pitch accepted by a magazine for my class) because, not only wasn't I able to focus on what I needed to write for the story to do the amount of recordings and research I had to go through at once, but also because I had no feeling of excitement to do it.

I would like to thank my Secret Santa Sarah for this journal. I've been trying to use it as much as possible ever since I got it a few days ago. Sure, my handwriting is still rusty from only needing to type my stories and notes for the past year or so, but I’m writing bit by bit each day. I've promised myself to use it every day, whether to write a journal log for the day, my notes for my news articles and/or for details for my feature stories or just a simple to-do list. You can’t carry around a HDTV everywhere like a journal.

But with this $18 brown leather journal, it did something a $2,000 HDTV can’t do for anyone: It brought my passion back.