It’s pretty simple. Gifts create bonds. Throwing away a gift supposedly means you no longer value the person who gave it or your relationship with them.
I suspect most folks fall on a continuum somewhere between “Callously regift or toss all gifts that aren’t useful or valuable immediately” and “Keep every single gift, like a packrat, alongside your adult children’s kindergarten projects and the rabbit’s foot you have carried since seven.”
Personally, I would keep the watch.
Or toss them in a drawer until they die. Either works.
Yes, that explains it very well. 
Some gifts are clearly ‘use and get rid’, but something like a pricey watch (and whilst $150 isn’t a fortune, it’s certainly more than a $20 watch) seems to be intended as a gift to be kept.
Fair enough - thanks for the explanations, Alessan, sandra_nz & minor7flat5
I guess I must fall closer to the “chuck it” end of the spectrum than the “treasure forever” end. It would never occur to me that there was any bond or obligation or really any tie whatsoever after 13 years! But now that I think of it, when I’ve received a gift that was obviously pricey I would hold onto it longer than a cheap gift even if I didn’t like them equally. So I must’ve intuitively absorbed the same ‘lesson’ at some point but never examined it or thought about it much.
People are weird 
I usually keep every gift because i grew up poor. Some years my Christmas present was a bag of groceries. More often then not, it was somebody else’s trash. To have something purchased specifically for me rather than a hand me down or garbage means a lot to me.
You know, you could skip a few steps by just getting a cheap cell phone. It will auto update from the phone company’s time nearly continuously.
I have a similar problem - my long-ago MIL gave us a matched set of Gucci watches she bought on a winning gambling junket. That entire side of the family is long-gone history, but I still have the watch and it’s very attractive. Unfortunately, the battery died long ago and I have yet to find a jeweler who will attempt to replace it. The style is the “stack of gold discs” separated by black enameled lines, and they are all afraid they will chip or break the enamel. So it sits in my drawer.
Yeah, well, as far as I’m concerned, the whole point of a watch is that you can just lift your wrist and look down at it to see the time, instead of digging into your pocket and possibly thumbing a button or password.
Too late. Watches are for people without cell phones or at an NYC board meeting. Since no one in the cell phone generation ever puts their phone away, there’s no need for a watch - I mean, you’d have to turn your cell phone hand over for a moment and lose sight of a quick Instagram.
John D. MacDonald made an interesting observation about watches in one of the Travis McGee novels from about 1972 - but the reference dates itself. Travis has a very expensive red-LED digital watch a grateful client gave him. He makes the comment that watches used to live in pockets and had to be hauled out and opened to read the time, putting man in charge of time. Watches with open faces put time in charge, forever pushing man along. Now that watches had a button that had to be pushed to read time, man was again in charge. (Yeah. Just a bit dated and narrow in timeframe. But amusing.)
Not everybody is using an atomic/automated clock. The clocks i use set the standard for everybody else to use. I use the phone, watch, and room clock. Instead of setting each one by one, if two out of three agree, that tells me pretty reliably which one needs to be changed. Also, phone clocks usally don’t display seconds on the face. Half a minute difference is enough for me to change the time. Just yesterday, it was my watch that was a minute slow, so you never know which one will be off.