Worst Gifts You've Ever Received

Not a Christmas present, but for my 18th birthday - my 18th! - my late grandfather gave me 2 x £1 Marks and Spencers vouchers. Anyone who knows Marks and Spencers knows that ain't enough to buy a carrier bag in there.

Yuck, Ben. I've been in the UK a few months now, and still haven't bought anything there.

There was one year (2004 or 2005, I've blocked it out of my mind) where I got more bobbleheads than actual gifts from my parents. No, I don't collect them. I didn't have any before that Christmas.

Why Mom thought I'd like bobblehead dolls is a question she still has not answered.

In fairness, their food is often excellent. But pricey.

This man speaks the truth.

One Christmas in particular sticks in my mind. It was a series of consecutively poor gifts.

I got:

A pool stick-I don't play pool
A shitty vacuum cleaner
One of those plastic balls with the electricity in them. My dog broke it.
Socks.

I think my brother was trying to get me to leave the house more by giving me the pool stick. I went and shot pool exactly twice with it. I don't know how to play and didn't have anyone to teach me, and I surely wasn't gonna just sit in the bar and randomly get my ass kicked.

Another thing I hate is those parties where you randomly pick a present and people can steal it from you. I'm a fat guy. I always, ALWAYS get stuck with candy.

My birthday is three days after Christmas. As an adult, I get the worst birthday presents too.

I am not a handyman. This year I got a bunch of power tools (orbital jigsaw?!?!?) that I would never touch in a million years. Actually gift wise, I'll say this was crappiest Xmas in years. We also get tons of gift cards for shitty chain restaurants (red lobster, applebees) that I flip immediately on ebay. I'd rather get no gift than a shitty gift.

One Christmas my grandfather bought himself a George Foreman grill, wrapped it, and put it under the tree. He feigned surprise upon opening it and we all had a good laugh. It was then I decided to begin joking about how I was so sad I didn't get one too and how I wanted one for my birthday (which is in February). It became a bit of a running gag over the next few months. I was very obviously joking, and we always laughed. That is until my next birthday where lo and behold, all I got was a George Foreman grill. I was 11.

Along those same lines, I made the same joke about how all I wanted for Christmas a few years back was a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer. Luckily, I recalled the grill incident and immediately made it very clear I was joking. My aunt was this close to buying me one.

Oh man, I hear you on this one. My family does this every now and then (in fact, going to one in a few days) and it always sucks. There's always like one semi-decent thing and I never get it. Once I ended up with a giant picture frame that still sits empty to this day.

Alarm clock.

Goddamn. Let's go over my list of stuff I got today, shall we?

1. A really funny nerdy tshirt. It was too small.
2. A fucking box of shitty chocolate.
3. Inglourious Basterds on Blu Ray. I own it on DVD. I don't have a hi def set. It also came with the soundtrack. Which I already had.

The trend continues. Maybe on my birthday, I'll get punched in the dick.

The worst present I ever got was a set of speakers for my computer from my father. When I installed them, they somehow crashed my computer, to the extent I had to buy a new one at great expense to myself.

This year:

* a fake gold pimp chain/"bling" in a dollar sign

* a faggy skintight gay nightclub top/sweater thing

* a James Bond calendar with 4 months devoted to Daniel Craig, and 1 month devoted to Sean Connery, and no squares for each day of the year in which you can actually write anything, such as "Dentist at 3.00" or something.

My great aunt, who knew me my whole life, somehow still thought I was special, gave me an Elmo floppy hat when U was 16.

I got the James Bond desk calendar this year. 2010 will be a year filled with random facts about Craig's life. Apparently, he has been successful in theater, television, and film.

Lucky you! A fact a day!

I have to wait until October before I can read the clunkily-written plot synopsis of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and see the same damn publicity shot of Timothy Dalton that I've already seen on every THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS-related piece of merchandise I've ever encountered in my life.

What fun it will be; reading what amounts to the back of a DVD case once a month!

Six years ago, my shitty, horrible ex-sister in law helped my brother with some of his Christmas shopping (who cares if she did a nice thing by helping him out? She's still a bitch from hell, so one nice gesture in over 30 years doesn't count). What does she pick out for me, a huge animal-lover who is vehemently anti-fur? A winter scarf made entirely out of rabbit fur! Fucking FUR! Keep in mind, this is someone who has known me since I was seven years old, and I was 40 at the time. My entire family knows that I'm the first one to yap at anyone about wearing fur, about not using products that are tested on animals, and that if I'm making a donation, it's probably going to an animal charity. And the bitch got me FUR. As soon as I got it home, it went down the garbage chute.

One year my grandma gave me my recently deceased grandfathers used beat up shoes which were way to small. Another year she gave me a coffee can full of powdered milk. Awesome

Four or five years ago my parents revealed how woefully out of touch they had become with us children by giving us a cavalcade of gifts ordered from QVC and sub-QVC mail-order catalogs. It was the Christmas of porcelain toothbrush holders, paperweights and desk safes. Nothing of any need or want was received that Christmas, and the awkward feeling of feigned excitement from each child was the worst gift of all. Their is a normal degree of feigned excitement and then there is the extreme degree we all experienced that horrific Christmas. I've honestly blocked out the memory of all the gifts that year, but the feeling lives on in the eternities. My parents learned from that experience and started talking to us children throughout the year to remind themselves that not all of us have interest in a 18 inch plastic loofa holder to scrub our backs in the shower.

Our Turkey came from there, as did a lot of our other food. Mind you the Turkey was £60

Not necessarily the worst, but definitely the weirdest was a few Christmases back when one of my uncles sent us that "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" book and a copy of Enron's code of ethics (hardy har). Now, this particular uncle has always been something of an odd bird, but my family and I are still baffled by that Christmas gift.

You sure it was powdered milk?
Was your grandpa by any chance cremated?

I got one of my friends a Digital Camera this year, a nice one too, and he bizarrely got me a box of chocolates. We exchanged gifts in the same room and after opening the chocolates I had to convince him not to open his gift until he got home.

The level of social embarrassment caused to both parties would have been too much to take if he'd opened that in front of other people.

Otherwise despite having a lot of interests (films, music, books, games, scotch) I'm a 'bastard to buy for' and have to pretend to be overjoyed by getting pens or gift boxes of scotch or bizarrely cook books and sets of knives (I expressed an interest in cooking when I was fourteen and people still get me stuff a decade later). Thankfully people seemed to have been persuaded to stop getting me random Simpsons stuff, that went on for about five years and I didn't even particularly like the Simpsons.

I got some sort of horrible stomach virus this year and spent most of last night throwing my guts up...

Oh, I forgot. El Snakeo's post reminded me. Last year I got a staph infection for Christmas. I spent my birthday (the 28th) in the hospital. Woot.

Your life seems tough. I'm very sorry.

Adam, don't be a dick. Seriously. I'm not arbitrarally bitching, this is a thread about shitty presents, and I was posting about shitty presents. It's not like I started a thread about this and went "Here, pity me!". I'm aware that there are a lot of people who would have been happy to recieve what I did, but this is essentially a humorous thread, and I wasn't gonna weigh it down with sentimentality.

Do you know someone who needs an awful box of chocolate and a shirt with the pi symbol made out of cake on it? PM me their address and I'll send it to them. Otherwise, quit derailing a comedy thread by being a sarcastic asshole.

Oh, and why single me out? Your post would have been relevent to anyone who posted in this thread. I'm sorry if I offended you, you mean-spirited douche.

A Care Bear; i wanted Optimus Prime.
Im not shitting you, people.

Cornelius: your crass e-pouting is a festive bounty for this mean spirited dick. So, all those mediocre gifts you didn't want — they managed to inspire holiday cheer in spite of themselves. And even though the cheer was in my gloomy corner of this world, it makes those shitty presents all the better.

Not poo-pooing this thread or anything, but since I frequently insist on receiving nothing (more guilt-driven than grinch-driven), I always appreciate anything I get. I guess it just means more if someone insists on getting you something when you've repeatedly given them the option not to.

At the company White Elephant this year, I got a picture of one of my male co-workers, topless on a beach.

Well, you win. This thread I mean, not life. Seriously, that's the worst present I've ever heard of.

My Great Aunt Florence, who passed in 1994 a year shy of 80, was a very proud woman. Never having married, she lived by herself in the same Manhattan apartment the last 50-some odd years of her life. Her neighbor for the last 40 of those years was a lovely woman named Mrs. Braun, who was a few years her junior and sharp as a tack. Mrs. Braun would assist my Aunt in her later years with cooking and shopping. That was until she suffered a stroke and was admitted to the hospital, never to leave. Not wanting to admit she needed anyone's help, my Aunt refused to even entertain the notion that she couldn't take care of herself, and could still do things like shop for herself. Since she was too old and too easily confused, she did not wander off her block, so her shopping was limited to the small corner market, a drug store, and a magazine stand.

Christmas Eve, 1992. I'm home from my freshman year of college for the holidays, bringing with me, to meet my family for the first time, the girl I would eventually marry and raise two daughters with. After a late dinner, the adults gather in the family room to exchange presents. Being a poor college student, most of the gift I receive are of the fold-and-put-in-your-wallet variety. Towards the end, I am handed a brightly wrapped box with the tag indicating it was from my Great Aunt Florence. I look around to see other people opening similarly wrapped packages, with most of the men pulling out cans of beer and the women finding themselves the proud owner of various cleaning products. Hearty "Thank you"s are proclaimed, and sly smirks exchanged. I begin ripping into my gift with great gusto, and as I open the box I find two items:

1) The Clapper
2) Maybe the filthiest pornographic magazine I have ever seen.

Okay, RasberryLeper just won the thread! Not only the worst gifts, but the story is still kind of heartwarming in its weirdness!

Not just bad, but a tad odd...a cousin (my mother's cousin actually) a few years ago gifted me with a box of cheap, orange plastic beads. The sort you'd use for an arts and crafts project. Now, it's not like we live on opposite sides of the country and hadn't seen each other in years, we run into each other every so often so I have a fairly good idea of the sort of gifts she'd like and she knows me well enough to know that arts and crafts aren't my sort of thing. It made me shrug a little.

Three or four years ago my sister bought me jumper cables. This would be a fine gift if I didn't already own some, but it's not like anyone ever needed more than a pair.
I assume she did her shopping on the 24th at the local gas station.