The Gift Of the Magi and The Necklace, though written in different time periods, possess common characteristics. Both are about two young women who, despite their financial instability, seek to buy what they can’t afford. Both characters go through a traumatic event that teach them about money and happiness, and how they are not necessarily related. The Gift Of The Magi and The Necklace share particular similarities in characters, irony and theme. In both stories the main characters, Della and Mathilde, share similar characteristics. Both are young, and married to very loving and caring husbands. In The Gift Of the Magi, Della is not honest with her husband. SInce she does not have enough money to buy her darling “Jim” a Christmas present, she decides to cut her beautiful, long, brown hair and sell it for $20. Though this ensures that Della can give Jim a wonderful present, it also worries her. The mood when Jim arrives home is described: “Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment” (Henry, 300). She is clearly scared of what his reaction will be when he sees her without her beautiful hair. In The Necklace, Mathilde isn’t honest with her friend, Madame Forestier, either. She loses the necklace that she lent her, and yet does not tell her. Her husband helps her decide what to do and says, “You must write to your friend that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to decide what to do” (Maupassant). She writes her the excuse and decides to get a new necklace by borrowing money from friends. Both Della and Mathilde are not honest with the people they are closest to. Throughout both stories, irony is used to convey the author’s message. At the end of both, the reader is left with a twist -- the opposite of what is expected to happen. In The Gift Of The Magi, after revealing that the