That makes me think of this.
And Aspidastra, for the non-Aussies and/or -Kiwis among us, what are “burger rings?”
And please forgive me for misspelling your handle, Aspidistra.
So they’re like Funyuns, only meat flavored?
Interesting.
That reminds me of a Christmas with a former boyfriend. He had been bragging for weeks about the huge christmas bonus he was getting and how he was going to spend a chunk of it on Christmas gifts for me and my mom. Except, he got off early the day he received the bonus, and went out to celebrate… for 2 days. I was worried sick. When he finally showed up on Christmas day, no money and no gifts. But he said he had gotten us something, but had left them at a friends house. So he left to get them. I got a t-shirt from a local radio station. It had a cigarette burn on the front and reeked with armpit stink. And a pair of filthy beige Isotoner gloves that were wadded into little balls and must’ve gotten wet at some point, because I never could straighten them out. My mom got a green crocheted cap, complete with strands of long blonde hair on the inside. She acted like it was the best thing she ever got, and was mad at me for being bitchy about my gifts. She wanted to keep him around because she could send him to the grocery store with $20 and he’d come back with $50 worth of groceries. :rolleyes:
Hey, a hamper is a fine gift. For an adult or unusually mature child. Not for a little kid. The hateful part was the little admonition, “Now you won’t leave your clothes on the floor!” Basically telling the kids that they were bad and this “gift” was intended to fix it. Right when the kid is expecting some cool toy on one of a childs most anticipated days of the year. It’s this kind of thoughtless, De Facto punishment that really scars a kid.
Yeah, it’s these kid gift horror stories that are so sad. Adults - well, I’ve given a few clunkers in my day. Never buy your Mom a calendar of pig photographs. She won’t think it’s funny.
But children shouldn’t be disappointed on Christmas. Childhood is tough enough - there ought to be one time a year when everything is pretty much perfect.
Every single year from the time I was born, until the time my aunt died, she gave me the exact same gift. A pair of purple tights, for a girl aged 5-7 years old. Every single year. They must have had a sale the year I was born, something like 30 pairs for a dollar.
The only time this present deviated was the year my mother told her that since I was 24 years old, the tights wouldn’t fit me, and she might think of something else to get me. So, she gave me something that I’m sure was from her house. It was a little scarecrow man that was attached to a candy dish. Not really so much a dish as a plastic cup. I’m sure when she originally got it, it was full of candy, but at a loss for a gift to replace my purple tights, she had to give me something in a pinch. That thing was hideous. But I still have it.
When I got married. She gave me a card that was obviously more of an anniversary card. She had scratched out some of the words that were printed on it to change them to “Wedding Day” as opposed to “Anniversary” inside the card, she taped a pair of huge glittery red earrings that said “FOXY” .
I left them taped to the card and put the card with the rest of our Wedding cards in a scrapbook. I gave her card its very own page. I thought it was hilarious. Gosh, I miss her.
Aww, shucks. I thought a lot of these other stories were lots worse than mine. Just because I grew up to be a slutty, godless heathen who calls herself Dung Beetle and still throws her clothes on the floor doesn’t mean I was scarred.
buries her face in her hands
“Why, Grandma? Whyyyyyyyyy!”
**General Hubbub, ** your post reminds me of something I miss about Christmas: My Aunts crappy-ass candy that she’d give out like the plague. It was about as welcome as the plague, for that matter. She’d take all sorts of snacks and douse them with birch bark or whatever that stuff is called. She wouldn’t cover things like popcorn or marshmallows or cookies with the stuff. It was always things like pretzels (not necessarily bad), sesame sticks, Cheezits, or other things that aren’t best served with birch bark. What made the candy so bad was that she was not skilled at making it. She’d pile a little bit up and douse it so that it spread out before solidifying. The visual effect was dead-on identical to novelty-store fake vomit. Now that she’s gone, I sort of miss it. For one thing, you could use it for fake-vomit jokes.
my great aunt (yes, another one of those) has a history of giving bad gifts. I think the one that takes the cake is when she gave me a cassette copy of one of her polka CDs. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that she was so cheap that she gave me a $1 recording of a $10 CD (and this was about 5 years ago, AKA way past the cassette age), or that she thought I actually LIKED polka music?
I don’t remember any truly terrible gifts that I got. Mr. m’s parents have given him some practical and supposedly thoughtful gifts that turned out to be quite disappointing (a bathroom scale, a pressure cooker), but nothing too bad.
For our wedding, my grandpa gave us a hideous pair of lamps from their house. But, I thanked him for his generosity and sent him a photo of them in our guest room. He was housebound at the time and wanted to make sure we got something from him, so I didn’t mind.
I hesitate to bring up my worst gifts because you will think I am making it up in order to ‘win’ here (though I think the bread machine and fake money with a note saying you owe mom money still win over mine )
Both came from my Grandma-in-law. Why she even bothers buying me a present I don’t know. She obviously wishes to spend $0 on me…
The second worst: A used drink making recipe book, the kind that comes free hanging from a bottle of liquor.
The worst: Used deodorant.
No, I’m not kidding. Deodorant…about 1/3 used.
[rant]
I like buying gifts and spend $$ and thought on them. People are usually delighted with the presents I give them. After several years of this from in-laws (my FIL and MIL aren’t as bad but I’ll get a calender while my wife gets a $200 present) I find it harder and harder to scrape up the enthusiam to participate. I am literally dreading Friday night…
JUST STOP BUYING ME PRESENTS! It’s obvious you don’t want to spend time or money on me…so just stop…OK???
/rant
Our great, great aunt had the tradition of giving us all a box with oranges and apples and stuff in it every year for Christmas.
The Christmas after she had passed away, our little brother (maybe about 10 or so) tried to carry it on by giving wrapping up a big box of oranges and apples and bananas…about a week beforehand.
When it came time to open it on Christmas morning, it was quite ripe.
We all got a little giggle out of it, but he was so embarrassed he ran and hid in his bedroom.
It was really sweet of him to do it, though. I think he even spent his own money on it. 
I have one aunt who’s never paid full price for anything in her life, and does most of her shopping at yard sales. Understandably; she’s quite uneducated and spent many, many long hours working in a factory to raise her family as she went through one bad husband after another. (Her kids all turned out great, though.)
But we had very low expectations of gifts from her as a result, and she never failed to meet those expectations. But somehow it never bothered us; we never wanted to actively laugh at her presents, no matter how awful (like the glowing red vinyl handbag I received when I was 16 that might have cost $2.50 at Woolworth’s when new, but probably not that much), because she meant well. She still does. Fortunately, she stopped sending Christmas presents after we grew up! She’s just a totally sweet and nice lady, albeit more than a bit dizty. She’s also coming up this year on her tenth year of being an ovarian cancer survivor, so go, Aunt Ruth! I hope she’s around to send cheesy gifts to her grandchildren for many more years.
Strangely, the only great aunt who still gives my sister and I presents always gives us absolutely gorgeous Christmas ornaments.
Here’s a bad gift for my father. I mentioned before, the way we do presents on my dad’s side is that we each get something from our grandparents (now we just get money) and something from our godparents. I haven’t gotten anything since my godmother passed away when I was 11, and my sister’s godparents are the son and daughter of the afore-mentioned great-aunt, so she gets her gift at another time. Well, one of my father’s godchildren is my aunt MC’s youngest son, J. So, he gets a present for J, and J gets him one (usually my aunt will often pick it out). She’s incredibly, insanely cheap (well, at least when it comes to other people, she’s not cheap when spending for herself) and a total braggart.
That year, she printed up some address labels, made some magnets and a calender for my father with her new computer software. Think that sounds nice? Think again-the magnets were some fugly clip art you could find in MS Word, the address labels weren’t even personalized, but just had our last name and our address. The calender-oh, what a nice gift THAT could have been-she could have put old family photos and personalized dates and everything. Nope. Just unattached plain sheets with the month and date, no pictures, just the big holidays, no family dates (anniversaries, birthdays). And the kicker-the ink had obviously gone down in her printer, because the tell-tale lines were there on the pages. Then she had the nerve to stand around and brag about what she made. Another they gave him a mini “Chicken Soup for the Soul” day calender. Blech. We ended up using THAT as scrap paper for phone messages.
I felt so bad for my father. His sisters usually only remember him as an after thought and it really hurts.
Maybe not the worst in the sense of the OP… but the gift that left me the most steamed (well, maybe the only one that left me steamed) might not really qualify as a Christmas gift.
First, it was Christmas, but the gift wasn’t wrapped. My mother-in-law-to-be :rolleyes: had gotten a free garment bag from some promotion somewhere. She displayed it to a few of us and offered it to anyone who wanted it. No one spoke up, so I said, well, I didn’t have one and could probably use it some time (admittedly not super enthusiastic, 'cause I didn’t travel much in those days).
Second, I never got the gift. I thought the deal was done, but the next morning I woke to discover that my sister-in-law-to-be had somehow intervened and pleaded that she really could use it more than I. :mad:
She was right, of course, but I figured she should have talked to me about it, not to the Queen Mother, 'cause I figured it was already mine.
It should have been a clue about the type of communication that occurs in the family, too, :smack: but I wasn’t noticing at the time. Luckily, I got over it, my spouse-to-be turned out not to suffer from all the communication maladies afflicting the rest of the family, we don’t see my in-laws that often, and we remain happily married.
My paternal grandmother, a bit of an odd woman, was notorious for the age inappropriate gift. Ironically, many of the gifts turned out to be quite meaningful later in life (like the beautifully crafted olive-wood creche from Israel given to me when I was 9, can you believe I actually asked my Mom if I could “play” with it?), but of little or no use to a child. The worst would have to be the cream colored t-shirt she gave me when I was 10. On the front was the drawing of the profile of a charlie-brownish cartoon boy facing a computer (circa 1986). A dialogue line extended from the computer and directed the observer to text which read: I think, therefore I am. This was the functional equivalent of kicking my ass, because that was the certain result were I to wear this t-shirt avec profound declaration outside the house.
My wife’s uncle and aunt are also quite adept at crappy giving. For our wedding, a regifted “Miami Ice” ice crusher (in its original shipping box with a 1999 postmark - we were married in May of '04) and a kerosene oil lamp - wah? why not a bucket of corncobs for the outhouse? We’re not talking any sort of elaborate lamp either. We’re talking $7, Wal Mart lamp.
The big winner comes from the in-laws though. For our wedding (I know, not Christmas), we received two leather embossed “Ryrie” study Bibles. These would be the perfect gift for the Christian Fundamentalist on your shopping list (what with the commentary on inerrancy and all) which they are/which we are not. Add to that the fact that I studied religion in college, and am quite religious (though of a different stripe) and thus have Bibles galore (from the scholarly Oxford to the personal gift from a dear friend priest). I know it doesn’t translate well to the post, but this was the equivalent of these “change yourself” gifts others have lamented, though instead of focussing in the mundane (cleaning habbits) it focuses on the incredibly personal, but then again this from the woman who views it as her personal mission to converts Jews to Christiantity - yikes!
The worst I’ve ever gotten was a waffle iron when I was about 12. That came out of nowhere and I never mentioned being into waffles or baking or anything. Might have used it twice, just to try. It wasn’t even that bad a thing in itself, but those things were really fairly expensive at the time and I couldn’t help thinking of all the cool things that could have been bought with all that money.
I also think a least some of all these bad gifts hurt not out of greed of not getting cool things, but because of people close to you having no idea who you really are.
Have to say though, compared to most gifts up here it was an absolutely fantastic present.
Oh, just remembered this Easter gift. My friend got me one of those boxed chocolate eggs. But couldn’t help herself and ate the egg. And gave me an empty Easter egg box.
So. . .I used to think that the worst gift I’d ever recieve was from my older brother (who was doing rather well at the time) who bought my parents a new VCR, but got me a bottle of generic “Tommy” aftershave, and then proceeded to tell me how much he paid for it to bring to light what a good deal he got. “I got it for $5. . .smells just like Tommy, right??” (no.) Not that I wanted to smell like tommy hilfiger. . .I had just started college, and was looking for more subtle scents.
Then, I got married.
My wife’s maternal grandmother was notorious for her . . . questionable gifts. Quite often, along with a bizarre gift (which can range anywhere from used household appliances to grungy looking, but still packaged underwear from the 50s) she usually supplies you with a good helping of expired food. (cheesecake from last year, generic nuts form the nineties. . .soda that expired in 81. . .The expired food thing doesn’t stop at christmas either. . .a couple of months ago, she brought up a potroast she prepared for my wife’s birthday and while she was heating it, she was talking about how she had just cleaned all the old meat out of her freezer. . .we all exchanged weary looks and ate sparingly. . .but this is another story)
So, the worst christmas present I had ever recieved. . .well, that requires long and deep thought since so many awful gifts have come to me since I’ve been married. . .I would have to say that the winner would be my second christmas gift from her. Used sweatpants, toothpase with an expiry date of 02/1977 (older than me), easter peeps from many easters past, and a brand spankin new toilet brush! My wife got a brand spankin new winter coat (along with expired easter candy) . . .go figure. . .
Anyways. . .it’s getting to that time of year again. I can’t wait to see what I get. . .