My Secret Santa took his time to choose what would certainly be a fine gift. Finally, a tracking number appeared on my Exchange page; Santa was delivering! As days passed, however, it became clear I would narrowly miss the delivery, as I was about to spend the Christmas week away with my family. The parcel arrived a few hours after I left.

I came back home on New Year's Eve, and was delighted to find the parcel waiting for me in the mailbox. Delighted, by also worried by the generous amount of sticky tape that the postal service put on a crumpled corner. In an impressive display of Newspeak, it said "we have reinforced your parcel!"

I opened the package carefully, and the first thing I saw was torn Christmas wrapping paper, and the damaged corner of a book. Bummer! I finally took out the whole gift, and saw that an envelope was prominently attached to the front, labeled "to be read before unwrapping."

I obliged of course, and was totally floored by what was inside! A pretty cut-paper gift card, and four pages filled with nice blue handwriting. The text was all about me, a very excellent tale of how I was waiting for my gift, full of little details gathered in my Reddit comments and profile, and about how a loud thud! was heard as a box fell in the fireplace, how I jumped to save it from the flames, how I was finally able to open it… At that point, I was half expecting to see Santa itself knocking on my window!

The card ended in a post scriptum, in which my Secret Santa said he had asked the postal service to dump the parcel in my chimney, and that he would lodge an official complaint if it was delivered any other way. Well, my dear Santa, there is no chimney in my current home, but the postal service sure dumped it! Are you happy now? :-)

At that point, I was too excited to unwrap the book, fully stocked about the whole surprise. Some high-fives had to be given, but there was no-one to give them to!

When I was approximately calm again, I unwrapped the book, to see what it was, and the extent of the damage. Thankfully, the damage was no too important, and the book is awesome. It is a rare book gift that manages to be both a complete match of several hobbies of the recipient, and a total surprise, never seen or heard of by him!

"Le Photographe", by Guibert, Lefèvre & Lemercier manages to be exactly that. This heavy, 270-pages French comic book is a documentary about Didier Lefèvre, photographer, about Doctors Without Borders, about the Afghanistan War in 1986, about all the people he met, the events he witnessed, and what he endured. He brought back thousands of pictures, all but six never published, and never told his story. This comic book is the occasion to do that, in drawn pictures interspersed with extremely powerful black and white photographs.

I shall read it with utmost attention. Thank you very much, Secret Santa, for this most splendid gift!