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5 years ago

Dying elderly man leaves 14 yrs of Christmas gifts for 2-yr-old neighbour

Photo: Collected
Photo: Collected

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The story of a dying elderly man leaving 14 years of Christmas gifts for his 2-year-old neighbour has gone viral on the internet recently.

Ken Watson, an 87-year-old retired diver in Wales, had bought the little girl next door Christmas gifts for the next 14 years before he died.

After Ken passed away, his daughter showed up at the neighbour’s front door "clutching a large plastic sack," Owen Williams, father of the 2-year-old girl Cadi Williams, tweeted Monday.

"She said 'these are presents for Cadi for the next few Christmases -- it's quite heavy'. She was quite emotional and I got a lump on my throat," the father said.

"My wife was on FaceTime with her mum in Ireland. I popped the bag onto the kitchen counter and my wife started to tear up and I started to tear up, and her mum started to tear up," the father said.

"It was like a Mary Poppins' bag, the presents kept coming. It's an actually unbelievable Christmas story," he said.

The father wrote on Twitter that Ken was 83 when they first met him, "bouncing a 20ft (6-meter) ladder across the face of his house."

Kind-hearted Ken Watson left behind 14 years of Christmas gifts for his young next door neighbour, two-year-old Cadi Williams. Source: australscope

"Our dog loved him. I mean, genuine visceral love ... He'd call her 'my darling' and 'sweetheart'," the father wrote.

"My wife and I think it might make a nice Christmas tradition to give our daughter 'a present from Ken' for the next 14 years," he wrote.

The family have opened one of the gifts, a children's book, the father tweeted.

As they were unsure what to do about the rest, the father created a Twitter poll to seek advice from netizens, reports Xinhua.

Among the 67,022 voters taking part in the poll, 69 per cent chose "lucky dip till 2032" and 31 per cent chose "open now, and rewrap."

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