Maybe not tacky or tasteless but everytime I get a lotion/body spray/shower gel set, I want to just hand it back. It’s been the go-to gift for females since they started marketing it that way, and thank you but no thank you, as women, we should know that each of all already has one for every birthday and Christmas from almost everyone we know for the past 10 years. Enough already!!
When I was first married, we received a wedding present of an ashtray with a pelican standing on it. Neither of us smoked, nor could we understand the pelican thing, being desert dwellers.
Every year for Christmas and my birthday I get piles of useless crap that pushes my acting skills to the limit as I say “Wow, thanks!”
People tell me it’s the thought that counts, and that’s what scares me; someone thought about these things.
The one that struck me as the strangest was when my sister gave me a concrete duck that had a different outfit for every month. Nowhere in my thoughts, actions, or lifestyle would anyone go into a store, see a concrete duck with fashion accessories and think “you know, L4L would just love this!”
Oddly, my neighbors got one shortly after mine and dutifully changed the outfit every month. I had to keep mine for a while so my sister wouldn’t think I gave it to them.
As a wedding shower gift, I got a candle much like the center one here, but in pure white. Okay, a bit…ornate, but not hideous, right?
Except that at the bottom were glued 3" sculptures of a little Hawaiian boy and girl, kissing. And our names were inscribed on them. A relative had been in Hawaii and had seen it and thought it was JUST THE CUTEST THING and that we needed to have it. And she expected us to use it as the unity candle in our ceremony.
Ugh. Let me say right now - I am not a froufrou or cutesy person. At all. This candle was both. Furthermore, I was already having a lot bigger wedding than I had planned on or wanted, and I didn’t intend for there to be a unity candle to begin with.
Thankfully, I was able to put her off “Oh, that’s much too lovely to burn - we won’t use it for the ceremony, we’ll keep it so we can admire it.” And indeed, it is there in my MIL’s china cabinet, since she is both froufrou and cutesey and also thinks it’s adorable.
My stepmonster is notorious for choosing inappropriate and often tacky gifts. One year, everyone got something except for my sister. No explanation was given. I think my sister was just forgotten. (Seven kids, plus spouses, and their 20-something kids = all my stepmom’s shopping).
A couple years ago, she sent me (I don’t go back to Ohio for this stuff; I wait for the USPS man) a pair of really cute, adorable pink pajamas. The kind of pajamas you’d put on a ten-year-old girl right before you read her a bedtime story and sent her to bed. I was about 38 at the time and remember thinking, “Really? What am I, 12? What grown woman wears jammies like this?”
Sometimes she sends me broken stuff because she doesn’t understand how to pack a package to avoid breakage. After receiving what would have been some really lovely glassware, had it not been shattered by the time it traveled 1,200 miles to my doorstep, I discretely called my dad and asked him to “help” her with the packing and shipping from then on. “Just drop some styrofoam peanuts in there, willya?”
Once she sent me some candy buckeyes – basically balls of sweetened peanut butter mostly covered in chocolate. Only they were packed in a checkbook box and dropped into the larger box with some other dumb gifts. Where the postman set the box down on the front porch, which was on ground level… in Florida… In December. I opened the box and started pulling stuff out when I felt a tiny bite on my leg. Oh! A fire ant! Wait, there’s another. And another! Oh crap! This entire box is totally infested with fire ants, who were busily devouring the candy buckeyes. I ended up taking the box outside to hose it off and had to throw out all the food and cookies and stuff she’d lovingly made because she hadn’t sealed any of it and seemed to have forgotten that it’s not freezing outside in Florida in December. We still have ants and the sun still melts chocolate that’s in a box sitting in the hot blazing afternoon sun.
My favorite may have been the knee-length sweatshirt with the sparkly snowflakes and snowmen all over it. It came with matching booties and mittens. For those freezing icy cold Florida nights. :rolleyes:
Shall I go on?
My aunt got a really, really ugly ceramic fairy. It’s about 18" tall and mostly pink with glitter. Imagine this but taller, monochromatic, dusty pink, with flecks of glitter and you’d have a pretty good idea.
The friend who gave it to her apparently did so with the best of intentions thinking that this classy, “Victorian statuette” was a nice thing to go on display in our aunt’s house (which is a very modern styled place). It doesn’t at all suit my aunt’s place or her sense of style. It’s quite the baffling object.
Shortly after it was given to her, I went to visit and she had me reach up and stick it on the top of a wall unit, so she could show her friend how prominently it was displayed, but really no one ever really looks up there and most people don’t notice it.
Also, when I was a naive little kid, I bought my dad one of those… uh… Metal paintings. Well, they aren’t “paintings”.I’m not sure what they are. Back in the early 1980s they had “artists” in booths at the mall, selling these kind of metal foil, painting like things. They were on shiny metal stuff, and had a very, very slight 3D relief. Anyway, I bought a picture of a bald eagle for my dad. I thought it looked cool. It was awful. :o
Every year I make homemade jam with the fruit from my yard. I give out this jam as Xmas presents. My Dad loved the jar I gave him one year so he gave me a store bought jar of jam the next year. WTF?
I really wish that people liked those kinds of things. It would make shopping so much easier.
One year at Christmas I was having a really hard time shopping, especially for my nieces. When they were little, it was easy – just get them a toy that I myself would love to play with. But when they were teenagers it was incredibly difficult. I was especially having a hard time finding something for the 14-year-old. Having never been a teenage girl, I couldn’t relate to what one would want.
I decided to seek professional help. I went into a store where one of the clerks looked to be maybe 19, tops. I asked her opinion on what I should get. She picked out something that I never would have thought of. And she was positive that no 14-year-old girl would not love love love it. Wow, I’m glad I asked. I never would have thought of something like that.
So on Christmas morning, my niece unwrapped her glittery, oversized, Winnie the Pooh snow globe.
She tried to put a nice face on it, but she was clearly thinking “Uncle tdn, what the fuck?!?”
My EX sister in law bought me a video camera. She made a big speech at the wedding shower about how she saved for a long time so she could afford such an extravagant gift. In theory it was a really nice idea. However, it didn’t work. When I took it back to the store she got it from they kindly informed me it was stolen.
Returning a stolen gift isn’t fun. Luckily the store was really kind and didn’t treat me like a criminal.
Without a doubt that’s the worst gift I’ve ever gotten. Because of sensitive issues with his family we never said anything to anyone about the video camera being stolen. When we were going through the divorce, she called to remind me she had spent a lot of money on the video camera and she’d appreciate it if I gave it back to her brother (my soon to be ex husband). I told her she could have it back, but she might get jail time.
A coworker gave me, as a going-away present, a package including:
- A DVD of an interview with a Holocaust survivor,
- A DVD of a one of the film interpretations of Kafka’s “The Trial”,
- A book of creationist literature, and
- A book Christian proselytizing aimed at Jews.
I was, at the time, a visibly observant (i.e. kipah-wearing, Shabbes-keeping) Jewish person.
Until then, the most tasteless and/or tacky gift I’d ever been given was an 18" candle in the shape of a dragon (housewarming present from a friend).
God, I love these threads.
My mom is hit or miss when it comes to gifts. On any particular trip she’ll bring back great stuff and crappy stuff. On a trip to Alaska she got me a cool paperweight in the shape of the state cut with a torch from leftover steel from the Alaskan pipeline. And then she gave me a fake-ass obsidian/flint “Native” knife on it’s own display stand made from plastic antler. One goes on my desk at work. The other went to a Doper White Elephant Exchange.
I do that too. In fact, I’m trying to start a pepper jam business. My market niche is I’m the only manufacturer (so far, that I can find) who mixes fruit in with the peppers, so my jams are “blueberry-habañero,” “blackberry-cayenne,” or “orange marmalade-jalepeño.” Last year for my birthday, some friends gave me some pepper jam from some (competitor) company in SC. Really? I have four cases of my homemade, fruit-organically-grown-by-me, hand-picked fruit & pepper jam and you gave me another jar “to taste against my own recipes”? :smack:
If I look at another jar of pepper jam (that doesn’t bring me $5) ever again, I will become stabby. And perhaps screamy as well. :: deep breaths :: My friends meant well. It took everything I had to be gracious about it. In their defense, the accompanying bottle of salsa is pretty good and I use it almost daily. (I don’t make salsa. Too easy. Like shootin’ fish in a barrel.)
You got a website?
A friend of mine was into buying cheap imports from catalogs at Christmastime.
One year she gave me a set on Ben-wa balls. It was hysterical because she had no idea what they were, she told me they were “hand exercisers”.
I had opened them in the presence of her 2 young children and her mother. Her mother knew exactly what they were, which had the two of us laughing all morning…especially when one of her sons started playing with them and licked one, at which point I said "don’t put those in your mouth, you never know where they’ve been.
No, not yet. Still developing recipes and I need to find a commercial, inspected kitchen to rent. It’s illegal to sell a food product that I make in my home (mostly because I have pets in the house). I have to give it away until I find a proper kitchen and get the FDA nutrition thingy on the label. At this point, it’s all “market research.”
My mother-in-law always gives me terrible gifts. One year she gave me a paint-by-number kit. Another year she made a donation in my name to HER church. I am not religious. Sometimes I think she does it on purpose. I was actually happy when she didn’t get me a gift at all last year.
My grandmother is also known for her odd gift choices. Probably the worst was when I received a large bag of Kirkland Dried Cranberries.
My mother got my wife as a gift - a mop.
Your mom thought the mop was really nice? How so?
It was a new kind of mop - a swiffer wet-jet - that my mom thought was exciting. It never entered her head that giving a mop to her daughter-in-law could possibly cause offence, as in indicated her supposed role in the house.
However, that pales compared with her subsequent tasteless gift - a hat for our newborn son, proudly given to my wife, with the legend “CHICK MAGNET” and a picture of a new-born chick on it. [My mom had an adorable vision in her head of our son leading a bunch of cute newly-hatched chicks around. It simply did not occur to her that it had another meaning].