And it would not surprise me one bit if he were to bridle at my thoughtful and passive aggressive gift!
I was about 2 years late with my then-14 y/o nephew. I got him the Axis and Allies boardgame. 12 y/o Matt would have been totally gaga over it. 14 y/o Matt had recently segued into girls and sports and being cool, looked at the box disconcertingly, then looked at me like I was crazy.
When we first married, my husband gave me a really pretty watch that I loved and wore till it was dead and beyond repair. By that time, I was a good bit older and my eyes were a lot worse. But he decided to buy me another pretty watch, which, sadly, had a very difficult to read dial.
Thankfully he was OK with me returning it and getting a digital camera instead. It was sweet of him, but the watch was not good at that stage of my eyesight.
I had a big, black, worn, hooded trenchcoat. I LOVED that coat. Deciding it was a rag, some well off friends bought me a gift certificate to Burlington Coat Factory. It was like they didn’t know me at all and actually made me cry.
I was 13 when I got into Avalon Hill wargames, but, yeah, by mid teens board games of any sort were pretty uncool.
Glad you enjoyed it!
My Grandma on my dad’s side was a full-blown hoarder. Two spare bedrooms in the 3 bedroom house she and my Grandpa lived in were full to the ceiling with boxes of stuff she had accumulated. So Christmases were a bit weird and unpredictable, because she’d basically find stuff lying around, wrap it, and give it to us kids.
One time I got a battery powered toy truck that was supposed to light up and move in some way, but it was broken out of the box. There was still a price tag with the store name, so my mom took me there to get a refund. A store employee said, “we haven’t carried this toy in 5 years”.
Among many boxes stored up in the rafters of their garage was a home skee-ball type game that I had noticed as a little kid, which gathered dust there for years and years. It looked like fun, I thought, but never thought to ask my grandparents if they would take it down and let me play with it. Then one Christmas when I was maybe 13, I opened a present, and yep, skee-ball game. Still a bit dusty.
you may be poor, but you sure ain’t stupid
I have gotten my fair share of men’s underwear and ties along my life…
I take it like a gentleman … (and I kid you not, I am wearing some read scooby-doo underwear today, I just checked)
You may by now have missed the opportunity to say ‘Thanks very much! We don’t have one locally but I’ll use them on my upcoming trip to X.’
Gets your thanks in, says you are going to be able to use them that time – and also informs them that you’ll have limited use for the things. But if this has been going on for years, it might seem odd to give that reply now.
Can you invite them to visit, on the sort of visit likely to involve going out for dinner, and hope that they’ll notice those places aren’t among their options?
Grandmas are often harder to shock than some might think.
Some years ago, my nieces gave me one of those big gift boxes full of processed cheese, additive-laden salamis, sugared nuts, odd candies, Very Salty crackers, etc.
All I could think, when I opened it, was how badly I’d wished somebody would have given me one of those when I was in college (and about their ages.) I used to see them in the stores and in ads and really want one; and never got one, then.
And how bad a fit it was for what I liked to eat when I actually got it, many years later.
I hope at least some of the first part showed on my face, and not too much of the second.
Many years ago my labor union had a gift drive for children. The premise was pay $50 for a child’s name, that money would be used to buy things the child needed like a coat or shoes. I drew the name of an 11 year old boy named Charles. A few days later I won a contest and received a 450 piece Lego set. I had no use for the Lego and decided to give it to Charles along with a few other toys and gift cards for clothing and other necessities. I was volunteering at the union hall on the day the gifts were distributed. I saw a family come in, mom, dad, a girl maybe 7 years told and a boy in a wheel chair. The boy had many physical handicaps and as I found out a bit later, was blind. This boy was Charles. The Lego set was totally inappropriate for a child like this. His parents had looks of dismay when they saw the Lego. I wanted to go apologize but part of the gift exchange was no contact between the gift givers and recipients. They seemed really happy with the gift cards so that was a positive.
Then someone at the organization in question dropped the ball when they didn’t tell the givers that they were dealing with a bunch of handicapped kids. [Should have explicitly put each child’s handicap(s) on the card below their name]
I feel lke I may have told this story in a similar thread a couple of years ago but anyway…
My folks have truly done their best, this isn’t a knock on them, but they often miss the mark with presents. Some of it is, they’ve never quite understood that for the number of things I have in common with them, I may as well have been adopted. My dad “likes to start the year with a new wallet,” in his baffling words, so for ages at xmas I’d get a new wallet that was too small to hold all the cards I carry, and I’ve got a small stack of them sitting unused in a drawer. I’ve received countless dress shirts in patterns I’d never wear, which hang in my closet for a few years before they go into a bundle for Goodwill. They sincerely do try their best, but they tend to miss the mark.
My dad also tended to enthusiastically buy into reports of what some new fad was, and I’d really like to see the news source on a lot of these. Sometimes it manifested in his being a bit gadget-happy, other times he’s swearing up and down that I won’t want a futon for my university apartment because the new trend is this collapsable platformy thing that folds into itself, that all the consumer magazines say is a hit with college students buying beds, and that when I finally saw a model in person looked like it would collapse into a finger-crunching mess if I laid a pillow on it.
But never more so than with the Coca-Cola™ Jeans. Sometime in the mid-late eighties, the Coke corporation decided to lean into branding (this is probably around the time of New Coke, so you know the cola’s original ingredient was involved heavily) and produced a line of jeans. Needless to say I was the recipient of a pair (“I read that these are really popular!”). First off, you know how yer average pair of Levi’s has that brown fabric patch of about three inches by two inches above the back left pocket, and which is usually covered up by a belt? These Coke jeans had a bright red square rubber patch the size of a dessert plate with the logo die-cut in the middle emblem in that spot. And for some reason, the crotch was cut very shallow, so that even when hiked up as far as they could go, the belt was lying really low on the hips and constantly felt like they were slipping down.
As far as I know, I never saw a single other person wearing these, and I didn’t, often. Like I said, my parents genuinely tried, and they did a good job raising me under sometimes rough circumstances (mentally ill sibling, and we were never flush in a stable way until I was well into high school) but gift-giving, to me at least, was a real hole in their skill set.
This was an unintentional fail and it wasn’t mine, but it was pretty hilarious.
My stepmom was at the stage of courtship with my father that she was Meeting the Parents. My grandmother was an extremely proper lady, so my stepmom was a bit intimidated. She decided to break the ice by giving my grandmother a pleasant, non-controversial gift. She chose a set of six large coffee mugs with a tumble of animals drawn on them. There was a giraffe mug, rabbits, elephants and I can’t remember the others.
My grandmother opened the gift with initial delight. As she inspected the mugs, however, a funny look crossed her face. She looked hard at my stepmom, who was tickled to have brought something my grandmother obviously liked. Grandma smiled, thanked her and set them aside.
The mugs were always in use when we went to visit, so I don’t know if my grandmother kept them out of sight when we weren’t around. But one day, my grandmother served tea to my stepmom in one of the mugs. My stepmom was sipping and chatting as she idly inspected her mug.
Then she gasped: Oh, my god! Look what the bunnies are doing!!"
She had never noticed that the tumble of animals were in an orgy of graphic sexual acts.
Oops.
I own the bunny version of that mug. 
Just last night, my daughter commented that it depicts a clusterfuck of bunnies.
That’s awesome! I have the giraffes, elephants and rabbits, which is why I could remember those but not the others. I still love them!
I have a cat pot holder I can send you. But I do actually use it.
Similar story, my ex told everyone that lime green is my favorite color. This is the truth. But I never, ever wear it because it clashes horribly with my skin tone and I look sick. Also there are several shades of green that can be called lime, without matching anything else. The result of his opening his mouth was my getting oh, let’s see, bright green boat shoes, key lime colored handbag, green bandana, green winter scarf, green t-shirt… I put a moratorium on the gifts people were handing over. I suspect that many of them were re-gifts that people had been wanting to get rid of.
The absolutely worst one was when my SIL was very proud of herself for scoring a bread making machine for me, her baking-crazed relative. Except that the summer before, I had announced the discovery that I was sensitive to gluten AND yeast and was no longer allowed to eat bread. This happened about two years prior to the gluten-free craze and she couldn’t wrap her head around my issue. When I moved, I left the bread machine, never taken out of the box, as a housewarming present for the new owner.
She’s 23 and still has a thoroughly weird fear of Furby.
And of course I live in a portal to hell. I do have ghosts.
A mistake I’ve never made, my wife informed me that one year for their anniversary, her ex bought her a mop.
And I thought the fight was bad the evening she walked in and asked me what was on the TV, and I replied “Dust” 
That’s your story, and I’ll bet you are sticking to it!
Most of the recipients were not handicapped, maybe 10 out to the 300 children we helped. This was the first year the union did something like this and this issue was never addressed during the planning stage.