Doomtrain's Bad Gift Thread...OF DOOM!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So my birthday is coming up, which means the arrival of gifts from ultimately clueless relatives. To cheer myself up, I decided to start an always amusing bad gift thread. I used to think sweaters and underpants were bad, but this year…man, this year…

Misc. Garfield Crap-Garfield was semi-amusing when I was four. Garfield stopped being amusing about age 11. I’m 24, or will be on my birthday. I have now found him not-amusing far longer than I ever found him amusing, but still I get the crap.

Instant Mashed Potatos-God, I wish I was joking.

Generic Band-Aids-I’ve never been prone to injury. And I’m not normally a brand name snob, but Jeebus…I can’t think of many people looking at a box of generic band aids and saying, “Sayyyyyyy, who couldn’t use crappy adhesive bandages on their birthday?”

A Crappy Inflatable Monkey-I, apparently, find monkeys hilarious. Which I do. I mean, who doesn’t? Monkeys=teh funny. See? But that doesn’t mean I want them around the house or as a theme around which to base my decor. Exception: If it was an actual monkey, cause that’d be cool for about 10 minutes.

Generic Fudge Brownie Mix-You know those Dessert Bakes they sell, where everything comes in a box and all you do is mix some stuff together and poof, tasty dessert? I love those. But this is not those. This is a bag of chocolatey powder, which would require me purchasing milk, eggs, and oil and preheating to 350 and spending two hours supervising. If I was going to the store, I’d just buy some pre-made brownies. Or a tasty dessert bake. Who buys fudge brownie mix as a birthday gift?

And then they wonder why I say, “No, seriously, I’d reaaaaaalllly realllllllly prefer a gift card to Target or something.”

Side note: Yes, I know gifts are given out of love and I’m a horrible person for criticizing and so forth and so on.

So what are your bad gift stories?

2

You’re relatives and mine are possibly related.

I will take your bet of Instant Mashed Potatoes and up you one **Sausage Log ** Received for Christmas one year. God, that was a banner year.

The joy I got from listening to coworkers talk about receiving designer perfums they’ve lusted after, a coat they’ve always wanted, music they actually like and I get to say when my turn comes, " I got a Sausage Log."

I always figured I could use it as a murder weapon then eat it.

3

Good freakin’ gravy. Someone actually gave you mashed potatoes and fudge brownie mix for your BIRTHDAY?!? What’n the hell, did they expect you to make dinner and dessert for when they dropped in ‘unexpectedly’?

As for me, someone gave me a joke gift "How to Pick Up Girls’ (one of the ones with a 450 lb. ugly woman as the ‘ideal date’ (the kind of joke-style cards and books you used to see in the fluorescent-lit, back-of-the-store, adult area of Spenser Gifts). Um, I am a woman, and I do prefer men. Still to this day, I don’t know what the hell they were thinking.

4

and I would like to state that the brother who gave this too me was a) severly disabled b) on disability and had zero money left over and I could just picture him staggering into the MegaMart ( refusing to use a cane or walker, he just lunged like a toddler to safety spots making more than a few people call security on him thinking he was drunk) and I figured he made it to the Center Aisle Impulse/Crap Gift area,saw the Sausage Log display, his stomach growled and said, " This is perfect and this is far enough…" I can only be grateful the display wasn’t something worse, but I cannot think of it.

I asked him as I opened up the wrapping…ohhh…what could this tubular item be? Braunschweiger? Salami? " Mark, by any chance were you hungry when you went shopping for this?"

“How did you know?”

Strangley enough, his gifts were the ones I remember the most, because it was like a permanent ten year old boy buying a mother an Xbox and then borrowing it on a permanent basis.

5

The all-time wackiest gift I got was from an old boyfriend, a Cuban fella, who apparently sent his mom and one of his cousins out shopping for my Christmas gift. Now in those days I was pretty much a jeans and belted big shirt kind of girl (this was the mid-80s, after all). I opened the box to discover… a black and silver glitter tiger-striped sweatshirt-thingy with matching spandex leggings. One look at his face told me that he hadn’t even looked at the outfit once before it got wrapped. :rolleyes: Thankfully he offered to exchange it for something more my speed, but even then he simply sent his mom back out with one of his more “conservative” cousins. They did actually pick out a nice sweater for me subsequently, even though it was rather tighter than anything else I had in my closet.

6

Shirley-I think I win. If these people were disabled in some way, it’d be understandable. But I think they’re just stupid. Here’s some other gifts I can recall:

Every Chrstmas I get a bar of soap and at least one box of Q-tips. Generic Q-tips.

Sweaters. I have never, once, in my life, ever worn a sweater. I’ve never looked at a sweater and thought “If only someone would buy that for me.”

Roadside kitsch. Anything sold in a tourist trap gas station that’s mass merchandised and then has a sticker with a state/city/location slapped on it before it’s put out on the shelf. Shotglasses are a favorite for some reason, though I don’t collect them or anything and have never bought one of my own accord, as I’m more a beer/mixed drinks kind of person than a shotglass kind of person.

The Klansman/Spanish Inquisitor (which I didn’t expect). My grandparents went to Spain and brought back the usual tourist junk. That Christmas, I opened up a little Klansman figurine and my jaw dropped. “Oh no,” they said, “it’s a Spanish Inquisitor.” And my eyes very nearly reached escape velocity from my head. Dopers in another bad gift thread determined it was some kind of benign Spanish priest thing, charming in its oldness…but they thought they were giving me an Inquisitor!

This birthday, I’m getting a mix CD from my sister that I picked out all the music on. My mom asked for a list of songs I liked, I responded with a list and a perplexed “Why?” and was told that my sister was making a mix CD for me for my birthday. Nice gesture, but since I picked out the music on it, I may as well burn it myself. (I may just be weird here, but I’m John Cusack in High Fidelity/“Song for a Mix Tape” by The Ataris when it comes to mix tapes/CDs, cause it’s something you work on for hour/days and put a lot of care into, not something you halfass).

A boat pen holder. It’s shaped like a boat. It holds a pen. It doesn’t come with a pen. You put a pen of your own in it. As for the boat, I dunno. I’ve never had any real nautical interest, excepting my geek-based love of pirates, but it wasn’t particularly piratical.

I’m as baffled as you. I don’t know if I mentioned that the potatos were wrapped up. It’s not like I’m deeply passionate about mashed potatos. I do like them, but they’re not anything you’d associate with me like you’d associate lno with pork. I mean, they’re tasty and everything, but I wouldn’t die if my mashed potato supply was tragically cut off. I can honestly say my life wouldn’t be significantly diminished if I never had mashed potatos again.

7

Got a wind-up duck (about the size of 1/4 a fist) from my grandparents when I was twelve. A little, teeny wind-up duck. I lent it to a 4-year-old neighbor and never saw it again.

Christmas of 2001, I got, from my lone remaining grandparent (from the same set as above), a luggage strap. The type of thing you put around a bulging suitcase.

There was a theme that year among my siblings. We all got things you could have bought at a luggage store in an airport. In fact, we thought it highly possible that this was the case.

Christmas of 2002, I think, I got something I can only describe as … well, no, I’m not going to go there. Someone less couth than I can crack the horribly tasteless joke. It was about the size of 2-3 credit cards, stacked on top of each other, and pieces of it came out (with a good hard pull) to be a sharp blade and other useful tools. A sharp blade, mind you, with one edge serrated.

As I said, there’s a horribly tasteless joke waiting there. Oh … did I mention this was supposed to fit in one’s wallet? “Sure, lemme just dig that Mastercard out … no, diner’s club … sears card … thick wallet blade … there we go! OW! OW! BUGGERALL!” World’s first Mastercard-related injury.

[sub]That wasn’t the joke.[/sub]

8

Wow. If getting only three gifts each year can be considered good, I’ll take it over what you people get.

The only complaint I’ve had in my entire adult life is when I asked my family (teh whole thing) to pool their resources and get me and my wife a video camera for Christmas so we could get footage of our toddler growing up and instead my Mom buys me a DVD player. That one really had me baffled and led to the subsequent loss of our tax refund to buy a video camera, but yeah … it’s the thought that counts.

9

First, just for the record, I really, really want a Spanish Inquistor action figure.

Now, on to the hijack. My mom has an antique poster (from the forties, IIRC) just inside the front door that has a bunch of those guys on it, seen from the back. Looks pretty Klanish, until you realize they’re all genuflecting towards a giant, obviously-Catholic altar. Some sort of Easter ritual they’ve been doing in Seville since forever. Cool poster, though. Goes well with the 19th Century leather-bound volume of Rudyard Kipling with the giant swastikas on the binding she has displayed prominently on a nearby bookshelf. I kinda think she buys these things in the hopes that someone will see them and freak out, but so far, no one has taken the bait.

Related story, although also another hijack, since this is a really, really cool gift, but she bought me an antique poster from WWI. It’s a big, bloody red handprint with the words:

THE HUN:
HIS MARK
Buy Liberty Bonds.

Nothing like classic anti-German racist propaganda to liven up the den.

10

Does it come with pillows?
that sounds dirty.