Can’t resist the temptation to post this:
As for me, I well remember my mother smiling graciously when being given an ornament, only to mutter, after the giver had left, “One more thing to bloody dust”.
And now that I’ve reached elderly uncle age, I find I’m getting scarves: lovely warm scarves, but honestly I’m running out of space. The charity shop beckons.
I don’t think I’ve ever given a present that totally failed. (My wife may disagree.) I’ve received some awful presents, though. Before he was married, my wife’s brother used to give us gifts that I’m certain were the first thing inside the door at Spencer’s. I particularly remember this device that would insult you when you pressed the button. It went in the trash by New Year’s Day. After he got married the gifts markedly improved, thanks to his wife.
One thing you should never do is surprise someone with a pet. I had a co-worker who, along with his sister, gifted a puppy to their parents after their longtime pet had passed on. The parents were not happy. They did not want to raise a puppy. He came in to work all dejected. I don’t know what happened to the puppy.
On a related note, a mutual acquaintance of my SO and myself gave her a scarf with pictures of horses on it. She doesn’t wear scarves so we re-gifted it to my sister who does wear scarves and loves horses.
That mutual acquaintance gave her the scarf in an attempt to make up for being an asshole; he still was, just in a different way.
When I was growing up, we had a shovel (spade) with an old, splintery, desiccated handle. It was the only shovel we ever had, so when I moved out, got married, and bought a house, I was delighted to find that the previous owners left behind a really nice fiberglass shovel.
This shovel was great, and so much better than my dad’s shovel. I didn’t know what a difference a good shovel could make. So I figured Dad (impossible to shop for) would appreciate a nice shovel as well.
Well, apparently Dad absolutely HATES digging holes, and everybody but me knew this. My mom thought it was some kind of joke, which led to…drama.
That made me laugh. But a lot of mushrooms grow in manure, and this box actually was mostly full of dried shit (horse shit, to be precise) with a bag of mushroom spores or something.
It was hysterically funny, because my aunt was a psychologist and felt the gift had to have a (not so) hidden meaning, and my mother knew nothing about gardening, and had no idea what would actually be in that box.
Oh yeah. I’m not objecting to everything with violence in it. I was just objecting to the Real HeMen Beat Up Everybody Else trope.
Sometimes people of any gender beat somebody else up for good reason. At least in fiction (less often in real life) that’s OK by me. So, in fiction, is Bad Guys Beat People Up, presuming there’s something else to the book besides that.
And that does look interesting. Wonder whether my library system’s got it?
[ETA: they do, but not at the branches I ordinarily go to. I could order it in.]
Very much true. I once gave my sister a cat – but I checked with her first!
It wasn’t Hermes was it? They often use a horsey theme. You could sell it on eBay for hundreds!
No idea. It wasn’t packaged and we didn’t look for a label.
It’s pretty normal in my workplace for people to give each other little gifts- either “I saw this and thought of you” things or things for birthdays or Christmas or whatever.
But we have one co-worker who complains about them probably 75% of the time. Most recently, it was her birthday and another lady just got her a thing of Albanese gummi bears. She normally loves gummi bears. But all day long, she complained- the gummi bears tasted weird. They were weird colors. She didn’t know what flavors they were supposed to be. She’d offer them to other people “Try these! Don’t they taste WEIRD?”
That’s pretty much her norm. Even if the thing is not actually for her, like someone else’s birthday treat. She won’t just go “oh, I don’t like this” and then shut up about it. She’ll complain ALL DAY that the cake was too sweet, oh my god it was SO sweet, don’t you think it was sweet? It was so sweet she can still taste it, why was it so sweet? And why was it raspberry? She doesn’t even like raspberry! She can still taste it in her teeth and it’s sooooooooo sweeeeeeeeeet ughhhhhhhhhhhh…
It’s so rude. Like, you don’t have to super-duper-love everything everyone gets for you all the time. Or everything that exists in the world all the time, for that matter. But you can always just… say thank you and put it away. Or, if pressed, a “it’s not my thing, but I really appreciate that you thought of me!” is enough.
My wife and I are pretty horribly difficult to buy for. We don’t want much, and what we do want, we tend to be very picky about, and we buy it whenever we want/need it instead of waiting for a birthday, xmas…
One day a decade or more ago, I thought I was inspired - REUSABLE GROCERY BAGS! This was when they started being A THING. I thought it would give my wife a feel good feeling, save the world, all that good stuff. And I splurged and bought the GOOD ones!
Well, they WERE a success to the extent that my wife has milked more than a decade of ridiculing me for the worst gift giving ever. And I have set the standard for a wide circle within my family, when receiving or describing uninspired gifts someone invariably notes, “Count yourself lucky - at least they didn’t give you…” So I got THAT going for me! 
A co-worker once gave me a plush cat for Secret Santa. Not having any use for a plush cat, I left it on a shelf in my cube. The next Christmas, my (different) Secret Santa used the plush cat as inspiration and gave me a cat shaped coffee mug. I don’t use mugs, I use a insulated cup with a lid, so the cat shaped coffee mug because a pen holder.
40 years later, my cat collection had grown so much that I had four big storage containers for the ones I didn’t have room for. When I retired I donated 7 banker boxes of cat paraphilia to the local cat rescue group and hope to never see another cat pot holder as long as I live.
What works for us is that if I suddenly can’t live without a specialized hobby tool, I will buy it, wrap it in pretty paper and put it on a shelf in a spare room. When it’s my birthday or whatever, hubs will pick a package from the shelf and give it to me. It will be just want I want and I will be thrilled to have it.
(my bolding). Wow, I really hope that was an autocorrect issue.
I was gonna comment on how, lacking opposable thumbs, cats are bad at holding onto one’s marijuana stash. I totally flew right over that other little glitch. Good eye there @muldoonthief!!
Huh. That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable gift.
But then, that’s what I gave family members one year quite a few years back. If they thought it was awful, nobody told me so. One person did ask if they could use it for a laundry bag instead, and I said 'sure! They make great laundry bags, or book bags, or whatever; use it for anything you want!"
Ah, the misguided t-shirt gift…
Many many years ago, I lived in Salt Lake City and was dating a fellow. He gave me a t-shirt for my birthday. The whole shirt, front and back, was covered with little proclamations: “Fuck red lights!” “Fuck lime-flavored Lifesavers!” Easily a couple hundred “Fuck…” expressions.
Apparently he appreciated what he perceived to be my “irreverent” sense of humor.
Well… sure, ok. But I’m not that irreverent, and certainly not in SLC! I wore the shirt only at home and only when cleaning the house.
One day I found I needed a particular cleaning product I hadn’t realized I’d run out of. Off to the market I went.
It wasn’t until I returned home and saw which shirt I was wearing that it dawned on me why everyone in the store was giving me dirty looks.
The shirt became a cleaning rag.
I think my brother-in-law is a lazy, fat, foul-mouthed, self-centered, alcoholic, who treats his wife like shit. Which self-help books to deal with the aforementioned personality flaws do you think he would most appreciate receiving as gifts?
First Grade Xmas grab bag. Some mother sent their kid to school to put this gift in the grab bag so I could pull out…
DRESS SOCKS! 
Why would you give dress socks as a gift for a first grader? Now maybe, if they had Superman or Bugs Bunny on them, maybe. I stood there crying as everyone else was playing with their Hot Wheels, Colorform sets, stuffed animals etc…
My wife told me about the time she put a lot of thought into what to get her older married sister, who liked to garden. So she found a wooden toilet at an antique store and gave it to her to use as a planter. Sis was apparently not happy with it.
Another mis-guided shirt gift!
I usually don’t get birthday gifts anymore but I think my mom feels compelled to buy me something so she got me a shirt that says “Secretly, I’m judging your grammer” (yes spelled as such) and she thought it was pretty funny, cuz really I’m a Doper so you know why she thought “It’s just like you!” and I was immediately totally embarrassed even though it was just me and her and the nieces sitting there.
I was like “look it’s one thing to maybe be a person who judges grammar, but I’m not really. But even if I was I REALLY don’t want to ADVERTISE the idea that I might be a judgy bitch.”
Mom was a little insulted but I just wanted to curl up and die. And then she proceeded to wear the shirt for a while because she didn’t want to waste a perfectly decent shirt, but thankfully she just wore it around the house. Finally I ended up buying her several very nice, plain, non-expressive shirts to wear that fit better and looked better and I could finally get rid of the nasty “grammer” shirt.
Good riddance.
Snarky jokes are one of those things that a) you can’t do for somebody else; they’ve got to see the humor for themselves first. And b) the funny only lasts a few seconds; unlike a shirt.