What presents have you given/gotten/witnessed that TOTALLY failed at achieving the intended happiness/gratitude/appreciation/other pleasant result for the recipient?
Note: the present must have honestly been meant to be a pleasant gift. No snarky “Beginner’s Cookbook” from a hostile MIL, no giant bottle of Listerine in an office Secret Santa, no assortment of lures from an avid fisherman to his non-fishing wife. Just cases where the giver thought it would be a well-received present but the recipient was anything like mystified/horrified/insulted/offended/other negative reaction.
Here’s the one I remember best: one of my father’s presents to my mother back when she was in her fifties was an electric blanket. Mother stared at him in anger and disbelief. “I have to get up three times a night to stand in front of the fridge because of hot flashes, and you give me an electric blanket???” She was so unhappy at his cluelessness that she refused to even open the package. (I mean, she opened the gift wrapping, but the box was sealed in one of those shrink wrapped plastic covers, and she wouldn’t open it. What’s worse she refused to allow him to even return or exchange it! (And my mother was a Depression era child who never wasted money.) She kept that box sitting on the sideboard in our dining room for MONTHS, just so she could complain about what a horrible present it was.
It was eventually relegated to the attic. About thirty years later I found it when I was clearing out after her death…plastic shrink wrap still around the box, though there were a couple places it had split, I guess from shrinking from the heat in the attic?
So, how about you? What ‘memorably’ bad choices for presents have you experienced?
I once got a tee shirt from my brother that was yellow and had an image of a triangular sign that said “YIELD It’s more fun”. Not only was the implied rape-y-ness creepy, but he had it personalized with my name. And the crap ass tee shirt shop didn’t even center the name! Even if I would have liked it, it was unwearable. So, bad choice and bad execution. I don’t think I even used it for a rag.
That’s the only time he ever gave me anything that bad. This was at least 50 years ago, so…definitely memorable!
My brother gave me a DVD of Brokeback Mountain one Christmas in a attempt to tell me he was gay. I told him that I had known that for years and that type of movie just wasn’t my thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
When I was married, my in-laws gave me a sweater for my first xmas or birthday gift (I forget which holiday). It was a very nice sweater as sweaters go. The thing is I do not wear sweaters. Never ever have I worn a sweater. I’m itchy just thinking about wearing a sweater.
I smiled and thanked them. A year later they gave me another nice sweater. It was too late to say, “hey, I fucking hate sweaters”, so I smiled and thanked them. Eventually there were 8 sweaters, new in box, taking up space in my closet.
Another horrible gift was from a friend-of-a-friend I’d done a small favor for. She was a masseuse, and gave me two $100 gift certificates for massages by her. The thing is, I would never want a massage unless it was being done as intimate foreplay with someone I was in a relationship with. The idea of a stranger or friend touching me grosses me out. So, I never used the gift certificates, nor could I regift them as they were made out to my name. The masseuse moved away a year or so later, which was good.
One year for Christmas a friend gave me a CD of Tom Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open…as a replacement for the one he borrowed from me and lost.
A girlfriend gave me a waffle iron as a birthday present…even though I had never said I liked waffles or eaten a waffle in her presence. (On the plus side, I re-gifted it to my brother who really likes waffles)
For several years my wife would borrow her sister’s cricut to make a plethora of stupidpointless charming crafty… things that she did God only knows what with. Because I have no desire to sleep on the back porch for a month I’m a good husband I kept my opinions on her various “projects” to myself. She finally reached the point where she was borrowing her sister’s machine 2 or 3 times per month.
So I decided to get her one for Christmas. I got her a top-of-the-line model that was on sale during a Cyber Monday sale, along with a YUGE box of the various tools and papers and vinyl sheets and extra blades and whatever else the friendly lady at the craft store recommended. I also got a big duffel bag-like carrying case for it all, and a subscription to the software that the dammed machine needs to run.
That was two years ago this December. Guess what’s she’s used maybe once in those two years?
Mine wasn’t in any way an objectively bad choice - it was a tenth anniversary ring and it did not make me as happy as my husband thought it would. Nothing wrong with the ring itself - but to wear it, I had to stop wearing my original wedding and engagement rings*. Which I didn’t really want to do but I didn’t feel like I could just not wear the new one without making him feel bad and I didn’t like the way wearing one on each hand looked.
* Which eventually led to them going missing , but that’s a different story.
I forget the occasion, but my gf gave me a very nice waffle maker. She loves waffles, so the gift was really for her. Along with the waffle maker she gave me a box of pancake/waffle mix that is still in the cupboard, unopened. When I make waffles I go all out and make them from scratch.
My Wife and I only give gifts at x-mas. We aren’t religious our anything, It’s just how it panned out. Which is fine for both of us.
My wife walks the dogs. Sometimes in the dark. I walk them too but in daylight. We live mountain rural. There is zero ambient light, except the moon and the stars. I bought her a head band thing lamp. It’s really bright and works great. About $30.
I’ve got terrible tinnitus. I have hearing aids that help. CC is a life saver. I have a couple of pairs of head phones that help a lot. I work from home so I use them for zoom/teams meetings. Works well.
The same year I gave the $30 head lamp, my Wife gave me a $1000 pair of headphones. Very, very, very thoughtful. But they are made for audiophiles. People that can pick up nuances in sound. It’s pretty much impossible to explain tinnitus to someone that does not have it 24/7.
I was of course gracious, and kept them. She was too excited about it to not. I use them depending on what set of head phones are charging. $1000 is no small change, but we are fine money wise. I had to make a very quick choice. And the choice was my Wife’s feelings on such a thoughtful gift.
Reminds me of the tale of the kid who gets his brother a baseball mitt for bro’s birthday. It’s a right-hand mitt for someone who’s left handed. And the gift-giver is the only southpaw in the family. Busted!
As to me …
I got remarried a couple years ago. We went out immediately after the civil ceremony & got matching plain gold bands. Which were intended from the git-go as temporaries until we could find the sorts of wedding rings we really wanted. We’d already been shopping for a couple months and had seen nothing that piqued our interest.
A few months later we found something very creative, out-of-the-ordinary, and artistic. A non-trivial sum of money changed hands and a couple months later our one-of-a-kind custom art rings were ready. She loved hers & I loved mine.
Two months later hers is in a drawer and she’s back to the plain band. She’s convinced the larger art ring is giving her calluses on her ring finger and that Simply. Won’t. Do.
Sigh. At least she’s really, really cute. If she stops wearing the band too, that’s when I’ll get worried.
Oh, God! My Grandparents gave me a yellow T-shirt with my school picture on it around 5th grade. HATED IT! Never wore it. Just the thought of the abuse I would have suffered in school had I ever.
My story: right around when Mrs. Solost and I were first married, I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, and one of the things she said was a nice-looking pair of sweats she could wear in public, say to the gym (back then we’d typically get each other 3 presents in order of niceness; the sweats would be the ‘level one’ gift).
Gift shopping for women’s clothes, on the rare occasions I’ve attempted it, has always baffled and terrified me. I went on my lunch break, so I was rushed to begin with. I found a nice pair of sweats with pink trim or piping that looked kinda stylish, but I wasn’t sure, and had other things to get, so I put them back on the rack. Here was my fatal mistake-- there was only one pair left in Mrs. Solost’s size, so to make sure they would still be there if and when I returned, I ‘cleverly’ stashed them at the very back of the super xxx plus size rack, which had many pairs on it, so nobody who came by in the meantime would find the smaller size.
After doing my other shopping I decided to get the sweats, but I was running late getting back to work, and you can probably see this coming a mile off-- I hurriedly grabbed a pair of the xxx super plus size by accident. I paid for, brought home, and wrapped the folded-up sweats without noticing.
I still remember, as clear as yesterday, the shocked look on her face, and my feeling of horror, as she unfolded and help up the enormous pair of sweat pants. Of course, part of the reason I remember so well is because she brings up the story to family and friends every Christmas
My GF loves Pac Man. She has plush Pac Man and ghosts. She has mass produced stuffed animals. She paid $50 for a handheld Pac Man game from the 80’s. I knew she’d love the different Pac Man hand held game I found for her.
Not only did she not love it, she seemed genuinely confused as to why I bought it for her. ‘I already have a Pac Man game.’
My sister knows that I like to read science fiction and fantasy.
My sister knows nothing whatsoever about science fiction and fantasy, with the probable exception of anything that’s made it into the English Literature canon (which is her field, but primarily medieval.)
One year she gave me something that I would classify in, let’s say, The Very Tough Men Beating Up Everybody Else In A Fantasy Setting Clearly Designed To Allow That genre. I strongly suspect that the only thing she’d noticed about it was that it was in that section in the store.
I said something along the lines of ‘Thanks for the present, sister!’ I have not read the book and do not intend to, except for enough to figure out what it was.
(Occasionally she also gets something Extremely Right. And mostly these days she gives me shirts, and the shirts are nearly always ones that I like.)
My husband’s grandparents once bought him a ridiculously expensive watch. He didn’t like it - too heavy. And I had recently had my wedding ring stolen. Soooo we secretly went back to the jewelry store and exchanged the watch for a wedding ring. I really like the ring! A pretty decent consolation prize for losing the original. So at least that time it worked out (for me.) I asked his Dad if we could get in trouble for the switcheroo and he said, “Grandma doesn’t mind as long as you don’t tell her.” Mum’s the word.
My FIL was once married to a woman who always had to make a big show about how generous she was. And they are wealthy people, so their things are not exactly practical to our lifestyle. There was a very awkward Christmas where my FIL’s wife just rooted through her closets and began giving us ugly and extravagant things she felt like giving away. She had the worst taste, and never bothered to listen to what you actually liked, just bought things she would like and gave them away and then pointed out how generous she was for doing so.
People who give gifts without thinking about what the recipient would like are a real pet peeve of mine. I’d rather have nothing than something I don’t like. It’s fine if you guess wrong, but for the love of God, at least try.
I was starting to think that’s not a bad gift. But, then, uh oh.
I just finished reading a fantasy/noir with a Jewish detective set in 1890s Texas called The Silverberg Business by Robert Freeman Wexler. You might enjoy it. I did. There’s some violence – it’s 1890s Texas after all – but the story was just so fascinating. Even though if you know any history you can see the big finale coming a mile off.
