Probably the most disappointing gift our son ever received was the Fushigi ball he got when he was 7 or 8 years old. He watched the commercials on tv countless times, begged his parents for months to get him one, as he was convinced he’d be able to impress and amaze friends and family with this anti-gravity ball. We flatly refused to waste our money on buying one, but apparently his pleas reached the ears of his grandparents because they got him one as a birthday gift after several months of his impassioned badgering.
I remember watching him gleefully tear it out of the package and proceed - unsuccessfully - to make it “float.” The disappointment he exuded was palpable and he gave up trying after maybe a minute and never touched the thing again. We tried to encourage him to watch the videos so he could master the movements required for the illusion, but this was to no avail.
Did you ever want a gift (maybe even as an adult) only to discover later what a terrible disappointment it was?
I have a Fushigi. I suck at contact juggling (like I do at regular juggling or anything involving manual dexterity). I maintain the Fushigi is a fine product at a nice price. Also, it looks really cool just sitting in an old brass fitting on my dining room table.
ETA
Floam. It was supposed to be a fun construction toy, like Play Dough. It was impossible to sculpt with and nearly impossible to get off your hands. My niece and I were very disappointed.
Not quite a gift but First grade Xmas grab bag, kids are pulling out things like race cars and superhero colorforms. I reach in and was so excited, I really did not process the fact that what I grabbed was soft. Somebody sent their kid to school with gift-wrapped dress socks for the Xmas grab bag. I stood there crying, holding my socks, watching everyone play with their new toys. At least they could have gotten something like Sesame Street socks, but no, just plain blue dress socks.
I was about 2 years late with this one. Axis and Allies boardgame for my then-13-y/o nephew. The instant I saw the dismayed look on his face I knew I had fucked up. If he was 10 or 11 he would have loved it, but by his early teens only sports and girls held his interest.
Every year for Christmas, we found socks in our stockings. My mother thought it was a great punny joke but we knew we were being fobbed off with a parental supply requirement as a gift.
That said, as I look back on the annual sock festival of Christmas, I know that I was luckier than my brothers who got tube socks and I got girly socks. Also that we were luckier than some of our neighbors and schoolmates whose parents struggled to afford socks. Selfish, we were.
Socks are a must have xmas gift. But they gotta be cool socks, smart wool or similar brand in zippy colors and patterns.
As a young teen I waited all year for the hope of getting my own stereo. I opened it up xmas day hooray. Plugged it in no sound, the speakers were defective. I was mad and sad.
I always give socks for Christmas, just so the kids can throw them over their shoulders like in A Christmas Story. Yes, I pick out fun socks or really good socks.
I got a really bad tee shirt from my brother for my birthday one year. It had a image of a yield sign and additional text that said “it’s more fun”. (I was like 10-12!)
So, vaguely rapey, plus he had them put my name on it, but the idiots at the shop couldn’t even center the name. I never wore it even once. Didn’t even make a good oil rag.
If you’re reading this, bro, I liked all the other presents over the years!
I bitched here many years ago about the stupid shit that my mother used to repeatedly give as gifts – clothing that I clearly would never wear, books that I would have no interest in, kitschy crap that I would never display. She did this for years and it infuriated me at the time.
However, now that I have teenagers myself I understand how hard it is to shop for them. Their interests seem to change by the hour and if I did get them something that they expressed interest in it would be the wrong specific thing. Kind of like my dad gifting me CD’s when I was a teenager. Right genre, right bands, wrong albums. I was pissed at him back then for being so (I thought) obtuse, today I’m ashamed at myself for feeling that way. He hated spending money and going to any store unless he absolutely had to so I know that he had to have made a special trip to the music store (back when those were a thing as this was solidly in the pre-intetnet days, or at least pre-internet shopping days), figure out what bands I liked, and try to figure out what albums I would’ve liked but didn’t yet own. I wish I would’ve recognized then how extraordinary that was for him. Instead I held onto them for a few weeks then took them to a second-hand store to trade for something I would actually listen to. I still remember what I traded them for: U2, Rattle and Hum.
That copy is long gone. I don’t miss it. But I do miss the two Pretenders albums and the Pat Benetar that he bought for me. Replacing them with, well, replacement copies wouldn’t be the same.
If someone cares enough about me to give me a gift, especially if it’s something that they clearly put some thought into, I’m going to be grateful. The stupid crap my mother used to give was stupid crap, to be sure but I failed then to recognize the thought behind it.
Edit: this isn’t meant to be a threadshit. It’s simply that I no longer consider any gift crappy.
And to actually answer this question in the OP that I somehow missed on the first read: not that I can think of. But then again my brother and I weren’t the type of kids to have a “wish list” for Christmas or birthdays (which may explain the gifts noted in my previous post). I do remember telling my larents about this really really cool bedside clock that played cassette tapes. You could set the alarm to play a cassette instead of the radio. They actually got that for me for my birthday one year. All these years later I wish I still had it; I don’t know what happened to it.
I asked my wife this question and the only things she could think of where instances when she wanted a name brand somethingorother and her parents would get her whatever the generic KMart equivalent was. Unconscionable when you’re a teenager. Now, as a parent looking back, totally reasonable and understandable.
A year or two ago my parents gave me a set of porcelain spoon rests made by a local artist – the same one that made labdad’s shot glass some years ago. One was very small and at first I thought it was another tchotchke for the kitchen but its actually to set a tea spoon in after using it to stir tea or coffee. Damn thing is actually really, really handy!
I asked for a sorta expensive RC car for Christmas when I was 10-13 ($50 in the early 90s which was a lot of money back then) and when I got it I drove it around for about two days then stopped because really unless you have a huge backyard with a race track for it there really isn’t all that much you can do driving it back and forth on the street.
It doesn’t get easier even if you let them make their own choices. My older daughter will find something at the shop and pick it out for herself and by the time we get it home and take it out of the bag she’s changed her mind and decided she hates it and will never wear it. And the longer delay between online purchase and delivery is even more impossible.
A few years before she died, my mother gave my brother - for his birthday - a jar of pickles. To this day, we have no idea what her thought process was regarding this issue.
Years ago I had my eyes on a rifle. An M-14. I don’t even know if I mentioned it to my wife.
One Cristmas, I saw what looked like a rifle wrapped up. The shape of the wrapping paper looked like a rifle. I didn’t touch it, or pick up the present. I was quite confused. Certainly my Wife would not buy me a rifle, and she would sure consult me first, she knows nothing about guns.
She also can’t wrap presents at all, I mean she is bad at it. I do all of that at our house.
The gift was a back scratcher. Your basic 89 cent bamboo back scratcher.
But honestly, I use it nearly every night. It was a bit disappointing though.
I should’ve suspected when, as a 14 or so y/o, back around Thanksgiving time in the late 70s, when my father and his 2nd wife asked if I would ever wear a leisure suit. I’ve never even hear of one before. When they told me, I immediately dismissed it as I wouldn’t be caught dead in anything other than jeans, work boots, and a t-shirt with a flannel shirt and was a disco-hating heavy metal fan, as were my friends. When I opened a “clothes-ey” gift box Christmas to reveal a green leisure suit w/a greenish pastel silk-ish shirt, I saw it as the nefarious plot of my parents to try to inculcate a less dirt-baggy, more formal way of dressing. Fail.
There was an entirely new thing on the market: a doll with joints not only at shoulders and hips, but with movable joints at knees and elbows and IIRC wrists and ankles! The doll could actually move into all sorts of plausible positions, she wasn’t just stuck unable to do much of anything!
I, who was not much into dolls, really wanted that doll. I begged for the doll. My mother said “It’ll just break!” I said “no no I’ll be really careful not to break it!”
She bought me the doll. It broke almost immediately. I admitted this, and she returned it and got a replacement (I have no idea whether she had to pay for the replacement.) And, almost immediately, I broke the replacement.
I hid the second broken doll, and didn’t tell my mother (though I’m sure she figured it out.) I thought for years that she had meant I was too clumsy, or too young, to have that sort of doll; and I was too embarrassed to tell her that I’d broken it the second time.
Years later, I told her about my embarrassment; and she said that she’d never thought I wasn’t careful enough, she’d just thought the toy was a piece of junk that would break way too easily.
When I was a kid I lusted after a toy kitchen that was sold at our local market. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I never got it, of course, but several years after I no longer cared we were staying with our rich cousins in Michigan. In their playroom, was that kitchen. It had been played to pieces. It was a weird feeling. I didn’t want it anymore, but to see it banged up and neglected made me think the wanting was better than the having. My cousins didn’t want for most things, but they all ended up pretty screwed up. It was one of those life lessons you don’t expect until they hit you.