For about a decade, my grandparents gave my husband a plaid flannel shirt every Christmas. I guess they had an image of him as a lumberjack. My husband doesn’t like plaid flannel shirts, and the shirts were too large to fit me well. I use them as jackets to keep warm when the house is chilly, so they haven’t gone to waste. What puzzles me is that the attempts to flannelize my husband continued for so long. After the first shirt was given to us, grandpa asked why he never saw my husband wearing it, and I told him gently (but frankly) that he just doesn’t wear that style of shirt. Grandpa shrugged and said “Huh, everyone likes flannel.” And that pretty much guaranteed the yearly flannel shirt.
My Father-in-law loves to give Kleenex boxes for Christmas. He does go find the holiday-themed boxes though.
He also will put random things in your stocking, like last year when my husband got a fan pull in his stocking (We lived in an apartment at the time, and it had no pull chain lights. We later learned the fan pull was for the fan in his childhood bedroom, where he no longer lives. So I guess it was useful, but not to the recipient.) He’s also been known to get band-aids, toothbrushes, and other assorted toiletries. Useful, but so’s Kleenex.
One of my aunts – a relatively wealthy woman, mind you – once gave me a little wooden tic-tac-toe game.
The worst part was that this game only had three Xs and three Os. Sheesh.
Anything purely decorative usually scores high on my useless list. I have no decorative sense whatsoever, and even if I did that wouldn’t mean that some of the crap I’ve gotten would match the rest of the room. Add extra demerits if it’s handmade out of yarn or wicker. Probably the least useful item I’ve ever received was a imitation moose head knitted out of white yarn. You hang it on the wall. Then you can look at a knitted yarn moose head on the wall.
I just spotted what must have been a present in my neighbor’s trash.
It consisted of a 3-way rechargeable tool kit. Only the tools seemed to be completely unrelated to each other. The battery handle could attach to a personal fan, the kind you might take to sit in the bleachers at a ball game. The second attachment was a micro vacuum, about 1/10 the capacity of a Dust Buster. The third attachment was a flashlight.
How on earth did those three things become a set?
This is why I don’t exchange presents.
About thirty years ago, I had a bleeding ulcer which was pretty serious in those days. I got given a tin of chillied peanuts for Christmas. Yeah right.
A nice bottle of wine.
-sober for 20 years
A ceramic hedgehog with a wire brush back, for the purpose of wiping shoes on.
Oh yeah, that thing had my name all over it. 
I once got a toilet seat clock, hand painted. I shit you not (no pun intended. OK, maybe a little). Like this:
http://www.phobe.com/tp/seat.html
I took one look, thanked the giver (my former sister in law) and threw it away the moment we got home. My ex-husband worried himself sick that she would come over and wonder where the clock was, but I took my chances. Sometimes you have to draw the line, and a clock shaped like a toilet seat is FAR across my line.
My sister once gave me a 1,000 hour FREE TRIAL OF AOL! disk.
OK, Jim. That beats the Kleenex for lame.
I want one!
My nominee: electrically heated chip’n’dip tray.
Nothing I’ve received has been quite as lame as wooden shoes named “Howard,” (on a sidenote, DianaG, my father’s name is Howard, and he’s quite impossible to shop for…), I’ve received:
fondue crocks (never ever made, or attempted to make, a fondue);
automatic card shufflers (from Walgreens, $9.99, that broke as I tried to insert batteries);
incomprehensibly complicated wine corkscrews (okay, I like wine, but I also don’t want to have to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering to open a bottle with one of those corkscrews!);
small wine racks that would fall apart if you placed anything heavier than a wadded up ball of kleenex on them.
ExTank, send me your address, and they’ll be in the mail tomorrow. 
Boyo Jim, you win. Tissues are at least useful, even occasionally needful. Wooden shoes at least are amusing. 1000 free hours of AOL can only make you think that your sister is still mad that mom liked you best.
We got a fondue set as a wedding gift (AFAIK, this is the law in Ireland and the UK). We use it about once every six months, and it’s fantastic. But I digress. The most useless present ever:
When we were ten, my best buddy Joe had his great aunt unexpectedly stuck in his house over Christmas - snowbound for about a week. She was a cantankerous old sod who hated him and me, and when it came to Christmas day she gave him… a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that she’d picked up at a jumble sale for 10p, clearly not having checked inside the box. We opened it, and it had been attacked by some kid with a crayon and ripped into pieces. Not that he’d have played it anyway.
To get his revenge, we put his other present, that his charmingly innocent Catholic missionary parents had given him, on the record player full blast and left the house. The last I saw of the great aunt was her unrepeatable expression of shock as she heard the Sex Pistols howl:
Frigging in the rigging
Frigging in the rigging
Frigging in the rigging
'Cause there’s fuck-all else to do
I thought about shaping and sharpening the CD into a throwing star-- but decided there was no one I wanted to kill, and no local ninjas around to frame for the crime if there was.
The AOL disc wins the thread so far; it’s useless AND lame. The Kleenex box is merely lame (and a bit insulting; is this person implying your nose needs wiping?).
My mother keeps giving me jewelry (not the kind with resale value). Not bad, except I almost never wear jewelry and when I do it’s usually a few simple pieces I happen to like; my mom gives me what she likes, which is not the same thing at all. I never wear rings or bracelets (don’t like them), and I have to be careful about earrings (nickel allergy), but she still gives them to me. Still, it beats the time my brother gave me The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and cheerfully said a book club had sent it to him by mistake and he gave it to me rather than fight about the order.
I watched each of my SiLs open their Christmas boxes to reveal pretty blouses and bath stuff. I opened mine and got a bag. A red bag. A glorified purse, really, but a teeny dufflebag with shoulder straps in construction. I hate red. Reasoning?
“For your books while you’re at school!”
The opening wouldn’t even accommodate a spiral notebook, let alone the 40# of books and other stuff I take every day (my days were not even as long then as they are now and I still took a ton of stuff). Really, this is what I have a huge L.L Bean daypack for. I think my husband used it to carry amp cords and spare guitar strings. Thing is, my MiL is usually more thoughtful than that. I suspect she was having a really bad week or something. Either that or Evil SiL shopped for me. Eventually the cat pissed on it and I threw it away.
I had some friends who played that game. They had a hell of a lot of fun with it. One of them was enraptured when she was in Paris and found a can of “Paris Air” in a gift shop. (Yeah-- an empty can supposedly filled with air from the French capital.)
I think the AOL disk and the kleenex are a tie - those AOL disks are very useful as coasters.