Worst Christmas gifts

There may have been a cultural sea change in recent years, when many more people started to give gawdawful stuff sardonically, especially at work, but I'm more used to it being given as meant kindly.


The clock purse has to be a joke, doesn't it? Doesn't it? (She says, thinking of the Spanada.. which to explain, was something aiming to challenge the market for Ripple. That Spanada was meant not as a joke.)

Ah, I get it, this thread involves both joke worst and non-joke worst. Maybe we can work out prizes in both categories. with an overall winner.

I got one of them **** bombs from overseas, can't wait for the new years gift....

But wait, in thirty years, that clock purse will be worth millions..

Hopefully not, as I tossed it right away! That clock purse wasn't a joke
to the person who gave it to me.....hardest thank-you note I ever wrote!

I gave joke presents, and received joke presents and they're actually
a lot of fun....

I got a Toni Doll from my parents, around 1950, related to the Toni commercials of the time, looked at it and put it aside. Might be priceless by now, maybe not, either way there's some irony there.

Gift giving is interesting, say.. at work. People are sometimes from different backgrounds and even within the same background, often on different tracks. I kind of like the variations from the usual acceptable stuff, especially if meant well. Not from condescending oh, lookee here - but, a window.

I still remember the (fill in word for caftans for women) my niece's mother gave me from Liberia, let me guess she chose that on prompting. They were immensely too large for me. I ended up giving them to my cousins, both taller women than I am. Let me guess they're gone. Now I wish I had kept them, me the keptomaniac. They were polyester, bla bla, but they were of a place and time. and now, of her.

So, a piquance for looking at odd gifts...

Once I received a plastic bottle full of pink bubble bath with plastic flowers in it that I think I spotted later in a dollar store. It probably cost more to send it to me than to purchase.

Another time we sisters decided to do "homemade" gifts. The sister who got my name has zero artistic ability and spent quite a bit of time making my gift. It was a piece of cardboard onto which she had pasted the face of a woman in the centre, glued other bits and pieces (doilies, other magazine pics, etc) all over it, then bordered the entire thing with fruit and veg stickers. WTH??? It was so awful it was funny. Talk about a hard thank you note to write!