Welcome to the Rachel's English podcast. I'm Rachel, and this podcast is made especially for non-native speakers to help you learn the phrases and idioms that Americans use while speaking natural American English.

If you would like a free copy of the transcript of this episode, just go to rachelsenglish.com

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As we're in the holiday season here in the U.S., many people celebrate Christmas.

It's become a commercialized holiday here in the U.S.

and even people who don't go to church

regularly or don't identify as Christians do often exchange Christmas gifts. So at the end of the

year here, we're going to be discussing gifts. And we're going to be talking about the best gifts

we've ever gotten. As we go along,

if an interesting vocabulary word or idiom or phrasal verb comes up, we'll stop and discuss it

to try to make sure that everyone understands how we use these in American English. All right,

I'm going to sit down here with my husband, David. Let's get started.

David, do you have any gifts from childhood that are very memorable for you?

Yes, I have one time in particular. I was maybe eight or nine years old. Maybe six or seven seven and there were two things that i really really wanted

one was the atari 2600 and that's a game console that was a game console that is one of the

originals is that something that plugged into your tv or was it a... Right. Okay. Yeah, plugged into the TV.

And I didn't think that I was going to get that. And the other one was this, I forget what it was

called. It was like a speak and spell, maybe. It had a little keyboard. It was this self-contained

electronic toy that taught you about spelling and punctuation, that I thought

was really cool. Maybe a friend had that. And I didn't really think that I would get either of

those. They were both stretch gifts. Stretch gifts. That means something you don't think you're

going to get, but you're going to ask for it anyway. Yeah, maybe reach is better. We would use that,

...