One Christmas I got a three pack of lady’s Hanes underwear. Uh, thanks mom?
Here’s the thread to post the worst/stupidest/weird/ lamest Christmas present you ever received.
A combination screwdriver/spirit level - useless as either >>> ebay!
I have a friend who traditionally gets me very bad presents. Or maybe just odd.
A wallet packaged with a small tool set - yes it was sold that way. Just odd.
A sweatshirt with Mickey Mouse bowling. I don’t bowl, I don’t ever wear sweatshirts *and *it was too small.
A tiny night light to read by. A great idea I guess, but I live alone and so I have no one to disturb - if I want to read I just put the light on.
A nylon bag of rocks. No candle or charger to go with them; just the rocks.
Weird record albums. Admittedly my taste in music is weird, but people keep trying (unsuccessfully) to gauge it. I’ve gotten:
a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention album (not my cuppa tea)
Renaissance Lute Music (bottom of the bargain basement recording)
and, the winner:
Music for Plants (I think even the plants would reject this one)
An old roomie of mine once received a tube of toothpaste from his grannie for christmas.
I got a scarf from my mom one year. Doesn’t sound bad on the surface, but 2 weeks earlier, I’d wrapped that same scarf, which Mom explained was a backup gift in case she got something unexpected from someone else - she could reciprocate with the scarf. Then on Christmas morning, she realized she’s given my 4 sibs tons of stuff and almost nothing for me. So I got the scarf.
I felt so special…
I’ve had a lifetime of christmas sweaters that my mom purposely bought two sizes too small. To *encourage * me. I’m 38 and roughly the size of a buick. And I hate sweaters. Not exactly the encouragement she intended.
Check out this thread, one of the true SDMB classics.
My grandma became notorious for giving terrible gifts when I was a kid. I used to actually dread her presents. For a long time, she was into the crap mail-order jewelry and jewelry boxes. She only bought it because she thought she’d win the huge cash prizes you could only get by ordering the stuff. She sent them thousands of dollars, and never won a cent, of course. Sometimes she’d wrap up a plastic jewelry box for us. Other times she’d just drag out a huge box of the cheap jewelry and tell us all to dig through it and take what we wanted. Of course, we didn’t want any of it, because it was ugly and turned your skin green.
She has gotten better in recent years. She loves to sew, and I have some great table runners, etc. that she’s given me in the past couple years that mean a lot to me because she made them. She still likes to pull the “bring out a big box and make the grandkids dig through it to get what they want” trick, though, and I still hate it. Just pick one of them out and give it to me! I’ll love it, because you made it for me!
A “Cat In The Bag” novelty gag item. Used. From my mother-in-law. Here’s an example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5952402290 (eBay auction, so I don’t know how long the picture will stay). She’d had it on an end table for ages. Next thing I know, I’m getting it in a Christmas package.
When I got home, I ripped the tail off, tied a piece of Christmas ribbon around the middle of it, and gave it to the cats. It’s one of their favorite cat toys.
I got one of those hideous “adoption dolls”. It’s cloth, looks homemade, very creepy looking, and comes with papers with the child’s name listed as the parent. They make them specific to the child’s hair and eyecolors.
I’m sure this would have been a fine gift for a small child, but I was sixteen!
Same aunt gave me a Dan Fogelberg record that year for my birthday. I suppose that wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t already know my musical tastes ran more along the lines of Iron Maiden and Metallica at the time. Funny though, I listened to it a lot when nobody was around! 
My other aunt was a regiver. I always got ugly sweaters in the wrong size every year and my cousin confided that it was actually stuff she got from her own aunt for her birthday a few weeks before Christmas.
I remember when I was about 20 and living in my own apartment across town from my parents, I went over to their place Christmas morning to open gifts. Under their tree for weeks had been this big, heavy box for me. I couldn’t imagine what it could be, but just knew it had to be something really special.
So you can imagine my joy when I opened it and found – a large wooden cutting board.
One year my aunt (my dad’s sister) gave both my mother and I purses.
Not bad on the surface, but…
I was nine (too old for dress-up and not really old enough to want a purse of my own) and my mother had never carried a purse in her entire life.
Plus they were used purses.
It wasn’t the scuffs and stained spots that really tipped us off to this - it was the used Kleenex, lint and antique gum we found in the purses that clued us in.
Of course, the next year another aunt (my mother’s sister this time) gave me an animal-print, three sizes too small, midriff-baring with a plunging neckline sweater. I was ten.
My mother took one look at it and laughed so hard she almost fell off her chair.
Were those the homemade versions of the Cabbage Patch dolls? Or were they a mass-produced thing that was supposed to be similar to them? I’m trying to remember them but I can’t.
I got a pair of Calvin Klein, size petite (I am 5’7") sandal-toed, sheer, black panty- hose from my MIL two years ago.
Gotta love my MIL-she’s the greatest!
I also got a strange present from my sister: a CD and cookbook. But the CD plays classical music (fine) and somehow the recipes are linked to the music. I don’t remember just how, but it was along the lines of “this music is from Mozart who wrote an opera in Italian, so here is a pasta recipe!”. That kind of thing.
Strange…
Oh wow, I blocked this one from my memory for years but just remembered it.
I was dating a guy who had a bunch of sisters, and they do a pick-one-name gift exchange in his family. So he decided he’d get the sister whose name he’d picked padded clothes hangers for her gift. I thought that was a bit cheap and suggested he get something else to go with it – I mean, she could buy herself padded clothes hangers any day of the week.
So fast foward to gift exchange. His sister gave me a lovely scarf, and I forget what his parents gave me but it was a nice gift, too. I got him a cordless phone, which I knew he wanted. We were pretty serious, , but we weren’t planning to spend a bunch on each other. It’s possible, however, to get a nice gift without it being really expensive, after all. So I figured he’d at least get me something pretty to wear, right?
Wrong. I open the box, and what’s in it? Padded hangers. Three of them. That maybe cost him as much as $5. And that required zero thought on his part, which is I think what pissed me off the most. He never asked either me or his sisters what I might like (and I had several inexpensive options for him), and he already knew I didn’t think that was much of a gift for anyone, not even his sister.
It’s not surprising that we broke up shortly thereafter…
My in-laws get us a lot of great stuff, but they feel compelled to get a lot of little gifts for us too, so some of them are weird and useless. They’ve gotten my husband two money clips in the past three years. He has a perfectly good wallet (which they also gave him!) and has no use for a money clip. He rarely carries any cash anyway. He’s lucky if he has change for the vending machine.
Last year they got us a dart board. We live in a little apartment and have no room or use for such a thing. We ended up returning it to Wal-Mart and using the cash for groceries. I’m not complaining, just sort of puzzled.
They also bought us a TiVo, a digital camera, a printer and a fax machine (though we didn’t really need the fax machine). The year before that, they bought us a new couch. They’re great people, very generous, but some of the weird little things they get us just baffle me. My husband says they’ve done that his whole life.
I’m not the kind of person who would bitch about getting any kind of gift. I’m touched that people would think enough of me to want to get me something.
Cool. Now I know who to give those puppy ear clippings to this year!