News Photo by Mason Hinkley News Publisher/Editor Justin Hinkley poses in front of his Christmas tree with a copy of “Detroit Rock City” on DVD, the same copy his mother hunted furiously for many Christmases ago, making the movie one of Hinkley’s favorite Christmas presents.

The Christmas Spirit has blessed me repeatedly over the years with some very awesome gifts.

I’ve never been much for pricey items. I usually asked for books or CDs for Christmas. But my parents nonetheless found ways to go overboard for me — a boombox one year, a guitar amplifier another. Even when we were our poorest, Mom scrimped and saved and begged and borrowed and always made sure we had an amazing Christmas.

But those expensive things, while excitedly cherished, never ranked among my favorites.

For that, you have to look to an act of love and fruity chocolate.

More specifically, a chocolate orange, made by Brach’s. It’s milk chocolate with orange flavoring, shaped and textured like a real orange. You pull it out of the cardboard and plastic packaging and, before you pull off the orange foil, you slam the orange on a tabletop to break apart the “slices”.

Each slice is sweetly flavored, the core — always saved for last — adds an extra bit of flavor at the end.

I don’t remember the first time the oranges showed up in my and my brothers’ stockings. The first one I remember came when I was 12. After that first time, they showed up in my stocking every year, even after I grew up and moved away.

Now that I’m married, with a kid of my own, my wife knows to make sure I get a chocolate orange in my stocking every year. She gets one too, and so does our son.

It’s a simple thing. Costs $5.99 at Walgreens.

But it’s the taste of tradition. Every year’s first bite takes me back to that 12-year-old boy overdosing on joy at the sight of the presents under the tree, snuggled up in the pajamas we opened every Christmas Eve, then spending all Christmas Day playing with my new toys.

And tradition’s the sweetest taste of all at the holidays.

But, as much as I love those chocolate oranges, my favorite gift of all time wasn’t what ended up under my tree, but how it ended up there.

I don’t remember how old I was, maybe 13 or 14 or even 15. I was really into a movie that year called “Detroit Rock City,” about a group of Midwestern teens in the 1970s trying to skip school to make it to a Kiss concert in Detroit, and they have all kinds of hilarious misadventures on the way. Gene Simmons produced the movie.

I’d seen it on late-night TV sometime and told my mother I wanted a DVD copy for Christmas that year.

The movie’s relatively obscure. It only made like $34 million worldwide.

As I heard the story later, Mom scoured Meijer, Walmart, Big Lots, Target, Best Buy, and the video stores for weeks. Found nothing. She even went to pawn shops and browsed the DVDs at Goodwill.

Nothing.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, after she’d already bought me more than I’d ever need (I think that was the same year I got a very nice guitar case), she decided to make one last effort. She went to Walmart again and looked into one of those massive bins of $5 DVDs, the ones entirely lacking any organization, just piles of DVDs dropped into a big wire basket.

Mom started digging. And digging. And digging.

Realizing she’d started to lose track of which movies she’d already looked at, she started pulling DVDs out of the bin and piling them up on the floor next to her, assuring the nervous-looking clerks walking past she’d put them back.

When she got all the way through every DVD in one bin, she piled them all back in and moved on to the next.

There were three bins, and she went through every single DVD in every single one of them.

Nothing.

At that point, Mom nearly cried. She’d spent something like 90 minutes checking and doublechecking every DVD and piling them up and putting them back, and she couldn’t find the movie I’d asked for.

Then, as if inspired by God, she decided to try one last thing.

She laid down on the dirty floor in Walmart and looked under the first bin she’d emptied and refilled. There, far under the bin, covered in dust and guarded by dust bunnies, she could see the shadow of another DVD. She had to flatten herself on the floor and stretch her arm to grab it, her face pressed painfully against the metal wire of the bin.

She cried again when she pulled it out.

It was a copy of “Detroit Rock City.”

It only cost her $5 (actually, it might have been one of the super-discounted $3 DVDs).

But it showed up under my tree only after a real act of love.

And that makes it more special than anything.

That makes it Christmas.