I'm so excited and speechless that I don't know how to begin!

So today my gift arrived. I waited for everyone at the office to leave before opening the package - after all, while the possibility of receiving an embarrassing joke gift is small, a pessimist is never surprised by her manager holding a massive reddit dildo.

Eh, what did I know! What I actually got was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received; my crazy dream gift that I had jokingly mentioned in a small side-note to my Santa.

In short, I got the gloriously named "A comprehensive Persian-English dictionary; Including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature" by F. Steingass, written in the 19th century.

To explain why this gift means the world for me, a little personal history:

I studied medieval Persian poetry in university. Believe it or not, I was the only student in my year; as a matter of fact I was the only undergrad in the entire Persian department. (Skipping classes was hard! The professors were shameless about guilt-tripping me.) I started the language from scratch, and while the first semester was spent wrestling with the grammar, by the summer my teachers decreed that I was ready for classical poetry, and therefore ready for Steingass.

Steingass is over a century old, but it's still THE book for reading and understanding classical Persian writing. It's 1500 densely printed pages of elegant, obscure and flowery words, wordplay, puns and medieval idioms that are explained nowhere else in English. You can't study classical Persian writing without Steingass... as a non-Iranian, you'd be lucky to even understand it.

Among its thousands of entries, Steingass tells us that 'khazra-khiram' means 'to move majestically like a sky' (and also 'to produce verdure'). Or how about 'shikara', which can mean trained birds of prey or intimate ladyparts, presumably depending on context?

And there are little gems like this entry for 'sada':

"A flaming fire ; a festival night on which the Persians light fires in commemoration of the following popular tradition: In the time of Hoshang (about 800 years before the Christian era), a monstrous dragon infested the country, the king himself attacked him with stones, when one of them, falling with prodigious force upon another, struck fire, set the herbage and surrounding trees in a blaze, and consumed the dragon in the flames ; a sort of tree with a thick, smooth stem and dense foliage."

I spent three academic years with Steingass. There was only one copy in the university library, and I had it for all that time. Nobody else ever asked after it.

Later, I got started on a PhD, got married, messed it up, got divorced, had to leave the country and abandoned the thesis. When I packed my bags, I was tempted to steal the dictionary and take it with me. Later, I wanted to kick myself that I didn't, because it proved impossible to get my hands on a copy again.

This is by no means a cheap (or small) book; and during the noughties you just couldn't buy it in my home country. Online sellers wouldn't ship, or the prize was several hundred dollars above my means. Academic libraries claimed to have a copy, but upon enquiry, were forced to admit that their sole copy of Steingass had been stolen or misplaced years ago.

Just a year ago, I had started thinking about finishing that PhD, if I only could brush up my Persian... and here we are. No excuses anymore, the PhD will get done now, promise!

To finish this amazing gift, Santa had also sent me a selection of vegan friendly snack bars and artisan dark chocolate, which I love. And yes, the Choc Chip Vanilla is maybe the most delicious thing I've eaten all Christmas!

I'm speechless and humbled to have received such a wonderful gift from a complete stranger. Thank you, Santa. I have no words. You'll be in my thoughts. Bless you; khayli shukr-guzaram!