I’ve been planning to get my two nephews drums and/or accordions when they reach five. Going by your experience, I should get started earlier.
However, one of their fathers is a guitarist ex-rocker, so he’d probably enjoy it.
Oh, man. I am in absolute shocked delight by your evilness. takes notes
I bought one of my nephews an accordian from World Market for Christmas a couple years ago. My sister still brings it up. I like the harmonica idea, I think he needs one of those this year. What the heck, harmonicas all around.
I bought my brother’s three little girls 5,000 piece bead kits( one apiece – that’s 15,000 ankle-turners!!) one Christmas. He nearly strangled me.
Well I did say she’s my sister-ex-law. And a bitch to boot.
Nonsense! Get him the fire engine and police ambulance with the sirens and the whirling lights - it helps build their creativity!!
My best friend has confessed that several of my gifts have suddenly “lost their batteries” and somehow don’t work any more. Being evil, I snuck my godson extra batteries and showed him how to unscrew the battery pack location.
What’s also good are those toys where you have to buy endless refills - like the barbies where you can cut their hair and then buy more, or the easy bake ovens where you have to keep buying all the little packets.
And my family wonders why I refuse to have children of my own. I’ve been the evil aunt way too long for that kind of karma.
I once bought my nephew a toy chain saw that made a life-like chain saw noise. I’m still getting crap for that and he’s 23 now…
One of the problems with China’s “One Child” policy is that it has caused traditional Chinese family structure to die off. Think about it for a second. With an official policy of only one child per family, it means that little Chinese boys and girls are growing up without aunts, uncles, and cousins.
This is a travesty!
An uncle’s place is teaching kids all the cool things that a parent can’t or won’t teach them.
Do you realize that two generations of Chinese kids have grown up not knowing the proper way to break wind?
After all, it typically falls to the uncle to teach the nephews (and sometimes the nieces) to “pull my finger”.
My evil plans are still in the formative stages. I’m a middle-aged bachelor with no intent to ever produce offspring. My baby bro has entered into a conspiracy to commit matrimony this Spring, and I figure bambinos will follow reasonably soon thereafter.
As the Big Bro (16 years older), guess who got to stay up all frakkin night Christmas Eve putting together bicycles, swing sets, flying horses, and worst of all…those thrice damned He-Man/Thundercats/GI Joe playset things that come in about a jillion pieces, 2-3 critical ones of which are not included in the package, and the assembly instructions are in Japanese?
Revenge is gonna be oh so sweet. Already warned little bro. Every Christmas/Birthday/Other gifting event will be marked by the arrival of a package from Uncle Oak. Said package will contain something the kids will love, but specifically selected for little bro to assemble. Yes, that includes a full sized swingset I plan to have delivered the day after the blizzard hits, so little bro gets to experience the unmitigated “joy” of assembling the damn thing on the coldest weekend in recorded history. MUHAHAHAHAHA…
A good friend of ours once bought his nephews Nerf swords and a big bag of gummy bears for Christmas. Truly evil. We only have a couple more years to wait until his kids are old enough to get the same thing from my SO and I. Not so instant Karma.
Until then? Wooden train whistles are always good.
We have declined to get my 15 year old niece the eyebrow piercing she wants.
My sister is her own brand of evil. Against her husband’s wishes, but with her blessing, her kids are getting snowball launchers & marshmallow guns. The dog is going to be wet & fat.
A few years ago, I got my wife’s nephews a toy that played Buster Poindexter’s Hot Hot Hot when you pressed a button. The boys really enjoyed it. I have a one year old child now and am dreading the revenge.
Gifts were given after Christmas lunch, when the kids had eaten 90% of the table’s lolly bowls. The nephews were 8 and 6. I’d wrapped two gifts, both with a card making it out to the pair of them.
“Dad! Look what uncle Nick gave us”
“A laser tag set?”
“Yeah - we’re going to use it right now!”
<Desperately scanning the package> “You can’t - it uses nine-colt batteries and there aren’t any in the set.”
<Dejectedly> “Oh. Do we have any batteries?”
<With a smirk that couldn’t quite be hidden>“Not that kind.”
Four presents later:
“Look! Dad! Batteries!”
Do I need to point out that I’d previously opened the laser tag set and changed every setting to the maximum volume and all the lights to flashing? And that I’d got a lift with someone else so that I wouldn’t risk my brakes being cut?
I remember when I was a kid it was odd how often the fun playthings my aunt gave us kids mysteriously stopped making noise after a few days. Later I discovered how skilled my mother was at toy dissection.
This year one of my nephews gets a 967 piece Lego set because my sister still has some floor space left.
The other nephew gets science-type kits to make his own slime and grow lots of neat mold and bacteria. I may never be invited back to that house.
It was funny how there was never room in the car for the magnificent one-man-band set our grandparents gave us. It always stayed at their house. Way out in their shed. The one with the lock.
I plan on giving my nephews a bike horn when he’s old enough. Not a bike, but just the horn.
I was rummaging through some stuff at Mom & Dad’s years and years ago and rediscovered the Gnip Gnop one of my sisters and I had so loved as children. I felt it was my duty as a good uncle to replace the rubber bands and present it to HER two kids.
Not a gift incident, but my dad, his friend from next door who babysat my youngest nephew and I all conspired to make sure his first sentence was, “That’s bullshit, Mom.”
You never saw three more beaming faces, or one more red with fury, than when, “Dahs booshit, Ma,” came out of his mouth a couple of weeks after we started working with him.
That can actually backfire. For our daughter’s first birthday we put her in a Godzilla outfit and had people paint cereal boxes and milk cartons and such like buildings and had her destroy Tokyo. We decided to feed her cake first, she was so blissed out from the cake that she sort of meandered through Tokyo stoned out of her mind. 
Got an anecdote. This past Halloween, I snuck into my nephew’s bedroom (16 y/o) and installed something called the Evilnator (from ThinkGeek)-it is a small electronic device capable of emitting several ominous sounds (creaking door, girl crying, mouse scurrying, etc.). It almost drove my nephew mad for about 5 days until he found it. I was hoping he’d then spring it on my sister, but no such luck; he threw it deep into the woods out back.
They got back at me tho-almost had me convinced that, because he was hearing voices and things, they were taking him to a shrink for evaluations for schitzophrenia and such.