Present

A Present is an item, depicted as a red box laced with a white ribbon, which may drop after defeating any zombie in any level or may be given as a reward randomly. Presents drop very rarely, and they may give you Zen Garden plants or unlock games. It will make a dinging or chiming sound when it is dropped, which is the same with Chocolate and Diamond. They often are plants for your Zen Garden.

Note: It is possible to find more than one present in a level.

Note: ''After beating Adventure Mode, you could still earn presents, but you won't unlock any modes. ''

Things found
For information on how to acquire Zen Garden plants, see Zen Garden.
 * If on the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game, the first present will hold Versus Mode and Co-op Mode.
 * The first present found will contain three Mini-Games. (Level 3-2, after the 1st flag)
 * The second one will contain three Vasebreaker and I, Zombie puzzles. (Level 4-6, before the Digger Zombie appears)
 * The next ones will appear after Level 5-4 and will contain a Zen Garden plant.Present.png

Where to get one:

 * Every three levels of I, Zombie Endless ; however, this is not the case for DS.
 * Eating a Brain in any I, Zombie level will sometimes drop onePresentOpen.png
 * Randomly in Survival Levels, espically in Survival Endless.
 * Every ten levels of Vasebreaker Endless
 * Randomly removing graves with Grave Busters.
 * Killing any zombie in any game mode.
 * In Crazy Dave's shop, for $7,500, although this is only on the iPhone and iPod touch version.

Which Mini-Game/Level is the Best to get Plants

 * For Day Plants, Slot Machine and Wall-nut Bowling are the best.
 * For Night Plants, just replay Whack a Zombie over and over again, remove graves for coins, diamonds and sometimes presents.
 * For Pool Plants, play Zombie Nimble Zombie Quick, Bobsled Bonanza or Last Stand with Marigolds for farming.
 * For Fog Plants, replay Level 4-10 (with the Zombie Yeti) or Survival: Fog (hard) as there is no mini-game in the fog which have a high concentration of zombies.
 * For Roof Plants, Column Like You See 'Em and Dr. Zomboss's Revenge are good ideas. Maybe you can also try Pogo Party.
 * Level 5-10, Dr. Zomboss's Revenge, Survival Endless, and I, Zombie levels drop every plant (Except Flower Pot, Upgrade Plants, Imitater, Explode-o-nut and Giant Wall-nut). Therefore, they are good ideas if you are not aiming for plants from a specific setting. (Although, Survival: Endless can actually be the best way to get plants since it has the highest amount of zombies in the whole game).

Trivia

 * Survival Levels will not appear from a present until the player beats Adventure Mode.
 * In the DS version, a present drops in Level 2-1 containing Versus Mode.
 * In the XBLA version a present also drops in level 2-1 containing Versus Mode and Co-op Mode.
 * Presents may have a higher frequency of dropping once 10x Chocolate has been collected and not used, since no more Chocolate may drop instead.
 * It is the rarest item that can be dropped from a zombie, dropping in a 10/100 rate. Or 10%.
 * It is unknown what happens when you have all 39 Zen Garden Plants and buy a Gold Sprout.
 * It may be impossible under this conditions, because there are no Zen Garden Plants you don't have so it may simply be sold out. (It did not show that on my iPhone version).
 * There are only 39 Different Zen Garden Plants of the 49 plants in total, Imitater, Gatling Pea, Twin Sunflower, Gloom-shroom, Cattail, Winter Melon, Gold Magnet, Spikerock, Cob Cannon and Flower Pot being the 10 that do not appear without a hack system.
 * This could be because someone could not have bought the upgrade plant from Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies and they don't give it for spoilers (Winter Melon, Cob Cannon and Imitater are the only expections to this rule before defeating Dr. Zomboss because they can't even be bought until he is defeated.)
 * Cob Cannon's reason could be because it would need a Pot the size of 2 to evade size confusion.
 * Flower Pot is not because it would be:
 * Pointless to put a pot inside another
 * It would be weird to see a sprout turn into an object made of clay and stone (This also goes towards Spikerock for obvious reasons.).