I think one of my wedding gifts takes the cake on this one. I got married this weekend and we had a great time with friends and family. Our gifts covered the whole spectrum, from crazy expensive on one end to no gift at all on the other and we were perfectly fine with that. The gift that made us shake our heads and say, “What the hell?” was from my cousin and his girlfriend. They are strange people in general but I still wasn’t prepared for what they handed us. When we got this 18 inch long package my immediate thought was that they bought us the largest dildo they could find but when my husband opened it he found 2 rain ponchos and 2 machetes. They wrote us a poem about how marriage is like climbing Mt Sinai (I married a Jew so they felt that this was the most appropriate mountain to use in the poem) and on our climb we will face metaphorical danger and bad weather. Of course, this means that we will need actual ponchos and machetes. I think this was very sweet of them in an odd sort of way (because I was totally expecting a giant dildo and anything that wasn’t a dildo was a step up) but because we weren’t checking a bag we ended up giving the machetes to my dad to take home with him.
So what have you gotten that tops the wedding machete for sheer strangeness?
and not weird, but cheapo-depot. For my high school graduation one of the items was a $5.00 gift certificate from the grocery store down the street. I mean, it would have been less weird I think just to put $5.00 in an envelope with a card! Then again they didn’t spend money on a card either.
My aunts used to give me some seriously dated clothes, but I don’t think that counts. Think tweed and bell bottoms in the late 80s. Little suits. Dressy outfits…I don’t think they ever noticed what a tomboy I generally was.
Nothing that tops the wedding machete, but last Christmas (I gave you my heart…) was quite odd. I generally get crap presents from my father’s side of the family, but Christmas 2009 saw presents that were both crap and baffling.
From one aunt, a book about gadgets that seemed to have a recommended age of about 8-10 (I was 19).
From one uncle, a plain black T-shirt in extra large (small is often too big for me), which is just the most useless, stupidest present I’ve ever received in my life. I can’t even start thinking about why they thought that would be appropriate or my brain melts and starts seeping out of my ears. WHY?!
From another uncle, a musical instrument of some kind that I still haven’t identified. It consists of a metal flat part and an attached ball on a stick which juts out at an angle. When shaken, the ball hits the metal and the whole thing goes “twaaaaaang”.
From the final aunt, nothing.
I’m very gracious and always polite, and my annoyance is more that my mother spends heaps on their kids and my sister and I just get a constant stream of shit, rather than being disappointed in the actual gifts. But these were just the silliest gifts, like some massive parody of strange/bad presents that everyone was in on except me.
The previous strangest gift I got was from the aunt who gave me nothing, around my 13th birthday she gave me some maracas and a pan flute. “I heard you were musical”, they said.
In a discussion at work one rainy April day, I mentioned that I was once a wino, and at my worst I ate pousse-cafes (layered liquer drinks), but I’d been sober for 35 years.
The next Christmas a co-worker gave me a boxed set of four cocktail glasses and a book of pousse-cafe recipes.
When I was 8 or 9 my only aunt (we always got wacky gifts from that side of the family…) sent me a pair of underwear briefs, sized for an adult male, with Santa Claus’ face right on the money spot.
I can only guess they were meant for someone else. I hope.
Around my senior year of high school, I had a long-distance boyfriend in college. For (IIRC) my birthday, he gave me a baseball cap with his college’s mascot (a tiger) on it. And not the logo, oh no. It looked like someone had taken a stuffed tiger toy, started at the middle of the top of the head, and scalped it forward, removing the ears, forehead, top of the face, and upper jaw, and then had it machine-sewn onto the baseball cap. Yup. Just what every teenage girl wants from her boyfriend.
Right now, I’m just trying to figure out why I got a present wrapped in a big “Disney Princesses” gift bag from my inlaws.
I invited my father’s aunt to my wedding. I had never met her, but I found her address on his old Christmas card list, and I had very few relatives. She answered in a very spidery hand that she was too old to attend, and enclosed a $5 bill. I cried and sent her a very nice thank-you card. She died a couple of years later at 96.
Congrats on getting married! Are you guys in a kudzu infested state? If so those machetes might be the most used gift you get.
The most useless gift I ever got, was a bike my dad got me for my 8th birthday. By that point he and my mom had been split up for 4 years, and I might have seen him 5 times in that time. The chain was rusted solid, the handle bars was loose, the back wheel had broken spokes, and it was missing the front wheel. This was also the only birthday present I ever got from him. It wasn’t until after he died that I found out he had meant for us to work on the bike together.
The weirdest would have to be from my grandmother. It was a wallet on a chain, which I had been wanting for a couple of years. The weird thing about it was, this wallet was not a standard size. It was 12" long, and 10" wide. Needless to say it wouldn’t fit into any pocket. I ended up using it as deposit bag when I was managing a retail store.
I found a machete once. And though I never had a chance to use it on kudzu, it came in handy in the yard more often than I would have guessed. It also got borrowed by relatives for use in their yard. Unfortunately, my middle son had been borrowing it when he moved to Colorado and he accidently (ahem) took it with him.
For Christmas, 1999, my mom gave me a package containing some old ties that had belonged to my dad, and a bag of dried cranberries. We are pretty sure the dried cranberries were her way of helping us be prepared for Y2K.
That was when we started noticing that perhaps her slight eccentricities just might be the precursor to dementia. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago.
When asked for a book called Hogfather, my mom gets me a T-shirt with a cartoon of a saint bernhard dressed as Vito Corlione with the phrase “Dogfather.”
I got a brick from my mom’s dad.
A former roommate got a tube of Colgate toothpaste from his grandma.
