My grandma always bought me lifesavers for Christmas. I suspect she rather didn’t like me.
Last year, my mother-in-law bought me a small Cuisinart food processor. Pretty nifty, you say? Well, I don’t cook. I NEVER cook. I HATE cooking. She knows this 
I think we might have the same aunt. My great-aunt once gave me a metal keychain. A slightly RUSTED metal keychain…
I love cooking, but I’m very particular about cookbooks. Occasionally I buy a cookbook to fit a particular niche I need to fill (crockpot recipes, quick supper recipes), but most of the time I’m looking for more “scholarly” works, cookbooks by chefs I respect and which teach good kitchen skills and/or cooking knowledge and science. Unfortunately, with the best of intentions I get relatives who will buy me cookbooks that I have no need for. Sure, those can be exchanged… unless, say, your father-in-law wrote “Merry Christmas from (them)” inside the front cover. D’oh.
My worst Christmas present might’ve been (at least, I think these were for Christmas) absolutely tiny, pinkish ruby pierced earrings from a (now-former) boyfriend. Ruby is my birthstone but these were so pink that they didn’t look anything like rubies. But the part that makes it “worst” was that I didn’t have pierced ears. I wore clip-ons occasionally, so I cut him some slack, but still. I went and got them pierced. The last time I wore pierced earrings was at my wedding several years ago. The holes wouldn’t grow shut properly - they tried to close up, but occasionally my right earlobe will feel warm and thick, and I’ll know it’s time to squeeze some pus out of it. (I don’t like jewelry these days and only wear a couple rings and a watch.) Either that or it was the mascot cap from his university - which wasn’t a favorite animal of mine or anything, but at least it didn’t require me to put holes in my skin which won’t grow shut and periodically get infected.
I think it was last Christmas when one of my husband’s sisters asked him what he wanted. He told her a particular brand and color of shoes, and what size, and even wrote it down for her. Come Christmas, she gives him a box, which he opens to find a different style, different color, and the wrong size; as he was unwrapping it, she said, “I thought you’d like these anyway.” I can kind of understand the wrong color or style, but the wrong size of shoes?! He returned them.
My sister (who is - shall we say - self-absorbed to the extreme) once gave my (now ex-) husband a fruit cake with one piece missing. She explained that she tried it and didn’t like it, but thought he might.
Many folks in this thread are describing P.C. presents as in -
Please Change presents.
My ex- gave PC presents to me every year. He liked biking and I didn’t. So I’d get a biking jersey, helmet, or some other cycling gizmo from him annually. I guess his resoning was that perhaps I’d finally be bitten by the biking bug, if only I had one more jersey in my closet that, like all the others over the years, was one size too small [hint, hint].
I don’t know, that sounds kind of sexy.
And Encyclopedia set, I’d love to have gotten one at the age of 8 or more, so I suppose it takes all sorts.
When I was 12 or so, I got a fake engagement ring from my uncle. It was the kind of thing that Miles Kimbal-type mail order stores send as the free gift when you buy something from them. There were a few other pieces of plastic crap included in the bag (a regular plastic convenience store bag) that were part of the same free gift set.
Now, my uncle has never given great Christmas/birthday (my birthday’s Dec 30th, so he was one of the Combiners) presents to begin with, but this was particularly heinous. I think he gave my brother a remote controlled car that year.
Looking back, after getting some slightly sexually inappropriate email from him in my mid 20s, the whole engagement ring thing makes me feel a bit skeezed out.
However, it’s not really as bad as it sounds. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic and the fact that he remembers gifts at all, wants to give them and then follows through with this is a miracle.
A fellow trainer in my department received a bag of used doorknobs and a box of rusty screws from his dad one Christmas.
Apparently my co-worker and his wife had just bought a house, and his father thought, “Why, **certainly ** he’d want to change out the doorknobs on the home they just bought!” 
I think that should at least crack the top 5 of weirdest gifts in this thread.
I got one of these only its much smaller. I think about 4 inches high and 6 inches long. I have no idea why my grandfather gave it to me, but I of course accepted it with great pleasure. I still have it. It sits in my curio cabnet and I fondly think of my grandfather everytime I see it.
My grandmother on the other hand gave some strange gifts. My mother once got a wallet from her. it was a mans wallet
Did you try…I mean, you don’t suppose…umm, I guess probably not, never mind.
I’d have liked that, but then I like to read. We had a World Book, but it was published in 1960 when I was two, and so much happened in the next decade or so that it was hopelessly outdated.
What kind of encyclopedias were they?
The worst Christmas present I’ve gotten? The crabs. Thanks a lot, grandma.
Just kidding. I’ve gotten many used presents over the years, but my family never had much money. It wasn’t so bad unless you could tell that someone was giving you something to reduce the clutter in their home, and not because they thought you’d like it.
My mother has also gotten me the same style of shirt every year for Christmas. It’s a style I wore in high school. 15 years ago. I’ve since found them a little ridiculous. Nevertheless, I thank her warmly, put it on immediately, and then typically donate it after it sits in my closet for a year or two.
The worst present, not Christmas, that springs to mind is the sex manual the wife and I got from her dad after our wedding. Creepy.
That’s pretty bad, but I think I can beat it.
My sister gave me the rocks for a candle garden. With no candle or charger or anything else. Just the rocks.
My MIL gave me a used cheese board. With knife gouges in it.
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I am sorry but that just made me crack up laughing…sorry, carry on…
This may sound like whining (it’s no wax pinecone or gouged cheeseboard, for sure), but here goes. To set the backstory a little bit: My husband and I had been married about three years at this time. His brother had a girlfriend that he’d been dating a few months, and they’d already had each other arrested on a couple of occasions for domestic violence (tip of the iceberg, believe me).
A few weeks before Christmas, my MIL asked me to make a list of things I wanted (perhaps she didn’t want a repeat of the Ankle Bracelet Fiasco of '01). I did, naming a few inexpensive things that I wouldn’t buy for myself but would like to have (silver earrings, a couple of paperbacks, candle holders, etc.). Christmas morning came, and my BIL’s girlfriend opened her gift. She received a gift basket with a bottle of perfume as well as some lipsticks and other cosmetics. Says she to my MIL, “I can’t believe that you remembered that I like this perfume!” Evidently she’d mentioned it in passing when they went shopping. I opened my present, and guess what it was? The same perfume, not something I’d wanted or even liked. And instead of cosmetics, my basket came with a plastic mirror and some wrinkle creme. It was nice perfume, but why did she even ask me what I wanted? And why get me the same thing that she picked for my BIL’s girlfriend, only worse? :dubious: FTR, I was only 28, I did not need the wrinkle creme.
I did get $55 for the lot on Ebay, though.
How about two grapefruit rolled up in an “Arizona Highways” calendar from the inlaws?
I wanna say “World Book” but I can’t really remember. They were brown fake leather things. It was probably around '79 now that I think about it, which would have made us like 6, 8 and 10. I was the middle-one, and definitely not 10 yet.
I can’t believe there are KIDS out there who would have thought that a set of encyclopedias was worth getting worked up over for a month. I didn’t really say it, but because of the expense, it really cut into our normal toy haul.
We were thinking robots, video-game system, some massive action figures, a little motorized vehicle – crazy things that didn’t even exist.
If you were a 10 year old boy, NOT DISAPPOINTED when it turned out to be encyclopedias, well. . .
Sure, it turned out to be kind of cool. I was actually a kid that liked flipping through them and just reading random crap. We used them for reports and settling arguments and whatnot. I also used to get Guinness books and various atlases for Xmas when I was a kid.
But come on. Get encyclopedias for your kids in July, not for Christmas.
Or rather get them, but don’t hype them up to the be the ultimate gift, maybe?
Another one I remember that wasn’t a bad gift, but it was a disappointment. When my cousins and I were little, until I was about 10, our youngest aunt, my aunt Katie, was unmarried and would buy everyone something, not just her godchild, as was the custom in our family. Well, the year I was six and my cousin Tina was five, my aunt bought her a new Golden Malibu Barbie doll and me a little yarn stitching picture kit. I ran out of the room crying, as Tina delightedly exclaimed, “Kathleen-wanna play Barbies?!” (NO!!!). My mother came up to get me and told me that SHE had told my aunt NOT to get me a Barbie, which my aunt had planned on, because I got so much other Barbie stuff from “Santa”.* Which makes sense, but it still sucked for me.
*A Barbie corvette, my Ken Doll, a Barbie hot tub that made REAL BUBBLES, a dancing ballerina doll, bunch of Barbie clothes, etc. So I shouldn’t have been such a brat.
Well, sure, I’d have expected some “good” presents too, but I woiuldn’t have run out of the room crying. If the encyclopedia had been the only gift under the tree, well then, I’d have been a bit vexed too.
For about five years or so, I consistently received 3-4 sweaters a year from my family. Sure, they were nice sweaters- typically speaking, my family’s got good taste in clothing. And they were fairly pricey, the sort of thing that I wouldn’t buy for myself.
The only problem was…
I lived in Texas. So did the rest of my family. I mean, there’s only like five or ten days a year that you can reasonably wear a sweater! You’d think they’d know this.
I had so many sweaters that I ended up having to devote an entire closet to the damn things- I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them, because, hey- they were gifts! Finally I broke down, though, and donated them to charity.
Of course, now that I’m up here in Oregon, I could really use them. Timing is everything, I guess. :smack:
Do Secret Santas count? I just got a Vioxx desk set, it being the product Merck just pulled off the market and class action lawsuits are pending over.
