My birthday, unfortunately, is December 24. Through no fault of my mother’s - I was due March 1st! So I tend to get a lot of presents with ‘happy birthday, merry christmas’ on them. Nobody forgets my birthday, they just can’t seem to find it in themselves to celebrate my birthday on my birthday. Christmas eve is family time, you know, it isn’t for partying at somebody else’s house (and please don’t talk to me about having my birthday party on some other day. How would you like to do that yourself every single year of your life?)
Well, I had a friend in 4th grade name Tracy Hasty. For one of my birthdays, right before school let out for the holidays, she brought me a GREAT BIG WRAPPED box. I was so excited! I opened it, and inside was…another NOT QUITE SO BIG WRAPPED box. And inside that another. I think there were 6 or 8 boxes all nested one inside the other, all neatly gift-wrapped. Inside the smallest one was a little bead ‘bookworm’ thing, hand-made.
I can look back now and say, it was a cute, clever thing for her to do, and it’s probably all she could afford anyway, because she was only 9. But I was so, so awfully disappointed. Okay, it wasn’t a christmas present, but it’s hard for me to separate the two. You understand.
My father hates Christmas. When he was a child, he says, all he ever got was shirts, socks, and underwear. Things he needed. Nothing he ever asked for, nothing he wanted, just things he needed. And his family wasn’t destitute, either. I suspect my mother made this worse by having us kids give daddy ‘presents’ of handkerchiefs, socks and underwear at Christmas, because we wanted to give him something, and what can kids give daddy anyway?
What’s so bad about an ironing board? Given that you didn’t have one and found it difficult to iron on the surface you did have available to you, it seems like a perfectly practical gift to me. Personally, I’d find it a lot stranger if you’d gotten the ironing board as a child.
I guess all I can think of is the little pair of Santa Claus guest towels that my aunt gave me. Suffice it to say my apartment is not the sort of place you would expect to find Santa Claus guest towels, or actually guest towels of any description.
Not Christmas gifts, but the worst gifts ever are given by my step-grandparents.
For my brother’s 21st they presented him with a block of wood with 3 hooks screwed in. Apparently, it’s a key holder, for him to hang on the wall. Note that it didn’t include any method of wall-mounting.
For my wedding, I received… one (1) small crocheted doily.
Funny thing is, we have a pretty good relationship with them, so this is actually what they give if they LIKE you. :dubious:
My brother, when he was seven and I was 12, got really excited at the prospect of buying me loads and loads of candies. So he saved up his allowance and went out to the store to buy me a cornucopia of stuff. This was weeks before Christmas, and he got a little peckish one day so he ate one Mars Bar. Then some of the other candies, because after all there was so much stuff I wouldn’t know. Then a few days later, another. Until Christmas Eve, when he had only one small packet of mints left, which he wrapped, and I opened, and feigned Great Joy. It was only years later he told me what he’d done, and that he’d been feeling guilty about it ever since. It’s such a cute story.
Just remembered another one: my friend Joe, aged 8 or 9 in the mid 70s, got given a used pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that his obnoxious great aunt, who was staying with them for three long and horrible weeks, had bought at a jumble sale for 10p (she left the price tag on it). It was damaged and scribbled on (she clearly hadn’t checked inside). To punish her, he waited until she was in the living room, then put on his other Christmas present on really loud and left - the original Sex Pistols single of Frigging in the Rigging.
Some of these gifts really don’t seem all that bad—at least the ones where the giver appears to have actually thought about what the giftee wants and needs.
However, some of them (soda can bible, refrigerator coil brush, broken whatevers) make me realize that all of the bad gifts I have gotten in my life really weren’t that bad.
It really is all about the giver’s motivation, though. Last year, a client of mine was very excited because she had found these gadgets (or something like them) at Target and had bought them for all of the members in her family. In her opinion, she was helping to ensure the safety of her loved ones. A few days after Christmas, I was talking with an acquaintance of mine and the subject of odd gifts came up. She mentioned that her mother-in-law had gotten her the weirdest thing, and went on to describe this exact gadget. Even when I explained that, like my client, her MIL may have had the best of intentions, she thought it was a bad gift.
My brother, when he was probably around 21, showed up shit-faced drunk on Christmas Day, with strings of lottery tickets for everyone. Each sibling got 10, my parents got 25.
Although I think they were a lousy gift, I seem to remember everyone having fun scratching them off. He’d obviously forgotten that he needed to buy gifts until the last minute, so stopped at a gas station or something on the way over.
My mom received a pack of those fuzzy felt circles that you put on the bottom of furniture.
The worst thing I ever got was a collection of different colored patent leather belts - hideously unfashionable.
One Christmas, my husband (now an ex) got me windshield wipers for Christmas. No, they weren’t installed on my car, and no, I didn’t need new ones. And, yes, I had to put them on my car myself. His response when I asked him WTF? “They have a lifetime guarentee.” The car was almost 10 years old, so I hardly think the guarentee was a selling point.
Last year, my mom got me this battery powered scrubber thing. I tried it once and discovered that if I had absolutely no muscle power whatsoever, then this might be a good idea, however, I could scrub harder with my nose than this thing scrubbed. It’s in a box in the basement.
Last year, for my birthday (which is 12 days after Christmas), one of my friends bought me a “Mr. Wonderful Doll”. It talks and says all these lines that Mr. Wonderful would say. I don’t play with dolls (geesh, I’m 37) and I think stuffed animals are creepy (and this was stuffed animal-ish). My friend thought it was a hoot. I’m glad he enjoyed it–I wrapped it up and gave it to him for his birthday.
I needed a bible as one of my textbooks last year. So personally, I’m looking at NinjaChick’s first link, thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it have been cool if I’d had that one?’
When I was younger I tended to get clothes a lot for Christmas. I mean, usually getting at least one or two full outfits. (I also once got just socks from a good friend of mine. But I’ll cut her some slack on that–she was poor). This would be fine, except when I was younger I also hated getting clothes as presents. I wanted toys, dammit! I don’t get them so much anymore, which is ironic, because now I actually want them.
On the other hand, a couple years ago I got a nightgown from my aunt. Which was nice, but it was from Disney, and had a cartoon kitten on the front. It is cute, but not what I’d expect her to buy for a 17-year-old.
I think the worst gift that I can think of (never got any really horrid ones, except for the socks) is the time my aunt bought be a candle-making/potpourri set. Nice, except for two things.
I was still quite young, and my mother wouldn’t help me with the candles.
My mother is sensitive to scented stuff.
I did make one potpourri sachet a few years ago, but that’s about all I ever did with it besides open it up and look at it. My aunts did have a habit of giving me gifts my mother didn’t like (I had lots of make-up by the age of 10, including one mascara which was quickly confiscated). However, now Mom is returning the favour
When we were kids (like 8, 10 and 12), there was a HUGE, heavy wrapped box under the tree.
For WEEKS, my dad talked it up, like it was the best present ever. Something for everybody. We were going to use it for years. On and on he went. I can’t tell you how much speculation and excitement were invested in whatever wonderful toy was in that box.
Finally, Christmas came and we all opened it up together. It was a set of encyclopedias.
My brother started crying and ran out of the room. I was devastated.
How my mom let my dad get away with that, I still don’t know. Normally, my dad is a pretty thoughtful guy. Not that year.
I remember one year when my brother and I were probably seven and eight years old, when a great big package with our names on it appeared under the tree. It was from Great Grandma. We were really excited and spent the weeks before Christmas in joyous speculation. Christmas morning, we made a beeline for the big package, and together we tore off the bright paper! It was a clothes hamper. We were crushed, but thanked her politely. She said, “Now you won’t leave your clothes all over the floor!”
I have an aunt who knows little about me besides the fact that I like to read. One year she gave me a big book of collected Dean Koontz novels. “If you like Stephen King, you’ll love Dean Koontz!” Well…no.
Another year, she gave me a big volume of the Bronte sisters. (I think she just tries to buy the largest book she can find.) I was disappointed. However, a few years later, I decided I’d read the damn thing cover to cover if it killed me. Lo and behold, I really enjoyed it. So, the moral of the story is: That anecdote really doesn’t belong in this thread.
Well, I didn’t ask for one, for starters. If I had wanted one, I could have bought it myself. It was also too practical a gift, falling into the “socks and underwear” category. Better than a mop perhaps, but not as much fun as, say, a fine single-malt Scotch.
But what really made it worse was my aunt. I tried to be gracious and polite about the whole thing (while asking if she could return it to the store), but her condescending attitude throughout the day made things worse. I don’t recall exactly what she said, but her comments were what you might say to a little girl. Finally, I had had enough.
Perhaps it was useful. Perhaps I needed it. But I didn’t want to receive it as a Christmas gift, and especially not with my aunt’s comments.
I think I will start with the worst gift of theirs and move towards the best of the worst.
A nightgown. First of all, your in-laws should never be interested in what you sleep in. Second, they especially should not buy you anything to sleep in, considering that’s what their son will be taking off of you when you have nookie. That’s just…gross. What’s worse is that this particular nightgown was huge and covered all over, and it had a cartoon character on the front. What’s even more worse is that my mother-in-law gushed about this cartoon character, saying it was my husband’s favorite when he was a child and how he just loved it and how she was thinking of him when she bought it, and if I didn’t want it she would keep it.
Of course I didn’t want it. Think about this psychologically. Would you want to infantilise your sexual relationship with your significant other? So she kept it. Now she is wearing something she bought for me to wear at night, with her son’s favorite childhood cartoon character on it. The whole thing makes me feel nauseated.
A terrible shirt. She sent it through the mail. It was black, it was mesh, it was scanty and it had another cartoon character on it. It was the worst article of clothing I had ever seen. It was an abortion. My husband took one look at it, picked it up with two fingers at arm’s length, and returned it to the box. We shipped it back the next day.
Can you tell she doesn’t like me much?
A telescoping tripod for my camera. However, my father-in-law had already used it. They had come out for a couple of weeks and he is an avid, though not gifted, photographer. He used it everywhere. He dragged it up trails and through canyons. It had scrape marks on it. They wrapped it up and gave it to me with the price tag still one it. The only reason they gave it to me was because they didn’t want to take it with them on the plane. He bought it used, used it for two weeks, and then gave it to me. I didn’t even want it, have no use for it whatever.
Little gifts: a bag of cornmeal. (WTF? Cornmeal? I have plenty, and I don’t want more, especially in a zip-lock baggie!) Two bushes, ripped from their back property (oh, just put it in water and it’ll grow roots. No, actually, the poor things ROTTED, had flies crawling all over them, stank, and I had to trash them. Thanks). Plant containers, blue ones, ceramic, eighties, butt ugly. I tossed them. A wine rack – rusted, holding the wine the wrong way (the cork should be wet). Tossed that.
One year my mom received a set of coasters from my dad. That was a fun Xmas. Also, every year I get a set of smelly bath crap from Bath and Body Works from my grandfather, which I never use, because I hate that stuff. I’ve asked my mom repeatedly to ask him not to get me that stuff, because those bath sets are expensive and I’d much rather have a gift certificate to a bookstore or something. But they always keep coming.
Also, I’ve found that when someone knows you like to read, but doesn’t know what, that’s always a recipe for disaster. It’s like “hey, a book!” and then you open it up and it’s the latest hot chick-lit novel or some psuedo-religious self-help book. Luckily Barnes and Noble has a liberal return policy.
