On 'good' surprises, I'll share one--although trigger/TMI warning, it is about infertility and doesn't really start as a Christmas story.
A few years ago, after a lot of weirdnesses in our lives, Mr. Dawbs and I had been trying for children for a few years. This had been challenging and stressful, in part, because when my hormones take their natural course, I have daily migraines with nausea. So I'd been in pain for the better part of 3 years and the treatments we'd discovered were incompatible with even *trying* to be pregnant according to the doctor (my rantings on my disagreement w/ the doctors on that can be another topic--it's moot because the doctors control the prescription pads)
Aenyhoo, in October, the doctor gave both Mr. Dawbs and I a whole battery of tests and the consensus was given to us around a not-very-pleasant-Thanksgiving that with our collective issues it was 'highly highly unlikely' that we would ever have a child without tremendous amounts of medical intervention. The fact that hormones in my system cause me no end of pain meant that it was going to be a bit extra challenging to have said interventions. I said that we needed to think on it, to sleep on it, and to all around have some time to grieve/process/figure out budgets/figure out some stuff before we took our next steps. I was entering my 'busy season' at work so said we would take our time and we'd decide how to proceed by spring.
We had much debating with the docs over the status of the prescriptions for the intervening time and eventually I prevailed on the doctors to allow me to keep absurdly close track of my cycles--so I was taking pregnancy tests essentially every-other-day and, since they were inevitably negative, I was allowed to take my medications every day, after my negative test (For the record, that was incredibly disheartening and depressing. Nothing like "oh, yeah, another negative pregnancy test, now I can take my moderately in-effective medications in order to take my pain level from an 11 to a 4 today. yay?".
(On the plus side, I learned you can buy cheap, no-name pregnancy test strips (without the plasticky things that surround them) in bulk, online, for something like .27c/test)
Christmas morning, I woke up and felt like hell. THat wasn't really surprising, I felt like hell a lot then--the previous few days had been pretty migraine-nausea bad. I decided washing my medications down with tasty Christmas wine was the way to go and, as always, I pulled out the morning's pregnancy test. Except, this time, it was positive.
Best Christmas present *EVER*.
(although I didn't ever get my wine. In fact, I didn't really get Christmas dinner--I had impressive morning sickness)
(And, it's really really hard to trust a piece of paper you paid 27c. for. Of course, Christmas day, it wasn't like I could just hop on down to the corner store and buy a second test. So, I used about $1.08 worth of cheap tests and dealt with the crazy the next day to be able to confirm with something not made by the lowest bidder)
We were headed over to my IL's house, but made a quick detour to my parent's house, where we told my family (OK, we didn't tell gramps, because he couldn't keep a secret to save his life--and I didn't need *EVERYONE* knowing on that day), and at my IL's house, I handed my MIL a gift-bag with a tiny baby outfit (I'd been working on sewing something; I had take me 3 years to sew it--I am not speedy) and watching her process that was amazing.
(and, FWIW, the child hated that carefully [if badly] sewn outfit, and wore it all of 2x.)