Gag Gifts
12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
Tales of the weirdest, wildest and worst gifts ever
Is it, as they say, better to give than to receive? There are situations when that age-old bromide can be answered with a resounding YES! Especially on those occasions when you’re presented with a gift so puzzling, so bizarre — so wrong — that you find yourself asking, what was that person thinking?!?
Early one Saturday morning, O.Henry magazine dispatched editor Cassie Bustamante and a bleary-eyed Billy Ingram out to the Corner Farmers Market to ask passersby about the strangest, oddest or most unwelcome gift they’d ever received. The answers may surprise you.
Take from me my lace
“Worst gift ever? One year, my mom forgot my birthday but she said, ‘Oh, I have a gift for you.’ It was a pair of lacy underwear. I was a married woman, 40-years-old, and these panties were two sizes too small, which meant they were her size. She gave me panties she had bought for herself, but they were way too sexy for me so I know they were too sexy for my mama. She didn’t have a husband. They weren’t in a pack or a bag or anything. They were on a little raggedy hanger from the store and they still had the Walmart ticket on them.”
— Queen C
Beauty is in the eye of the ugly sweater giver
“Every year the girls in the family get the ugliest sweaters from my aunt. She loves them, but we would never wear those things. Years go by and we just keep hiding them at her house. They are so ugly. Like hot pink and cropped and not our size. Last year she gave us all matching beanies . . . and they matched the ugly sweaters! It keeps getting worse.”
— Barbara Strickland
Happy Mother’s Day! Now go away
“For Mother’s Day, my husband gave me a trip away for that weekend, by myself, anywhere I wanted to go. And I thought that didn’t really honor me for being a mother too much. Where did I go? I didn’t go. I rejected the gift.”
— Christy Douglas
Lost in translation
“I was dating this fellow from Israel, and English was his second language. After a night of passion, he left a note on my pillow that read: ‘Good morning, sweaty, kisses all over your body, love Avi.’ I told him when he got home, ‘I think you meant sweetie!’” — Susan Grant
Once bitten, twice shy
“Someone gave me a box of chocolates with several of them half bitten into — all the ones that she didn’t want. She’d bitten into them, decided she didn’t want that, and she packaged it all up in a pretty little heart-shaped box and gave them to me. Now that’s a weird gift!” — Mari Rufo
It’s the thought, or lack thereof, that counts
Someone gave me a big pencil that says ‘Souvenir of Hawaii.’ I was like, of all the things you could have brought me back from Hawaii, you bring me the big pencil? Or it will be a plate or a T-shirt that says ‘Souvenir of . . . .’; the stuff you buy at the last minute in the airport, like that Seinfeld episode. Now, when I travel, sometimes just for fun, I’ll get my children a big pencil that says ‘Souvenir of . . .’ on it.” — Anonymous
Dads not a Duke fan, honest
“The kids gave me A Touch of Gray hair color when I was starting to go gray, but I wouldn’t use it because my father had tried to dye his hair one time and it turned blue. This was right before the N.C. State basketball playoffs with Duke. I knew he was going to be there with us and I told him, ‘I don’t want you there with blue hair!’”
— John Kelly
What, the elves ran out of Cabbage Patch Kids?
“When I was a little girl, Santa gave me a pirate ship. I was very upset about it because I thought Santa thought I was a boy. It was a pirate ship, so it doesn’t need to be gender specific, but for some reason I was upset. But now I love that pirate ship!”
— Caroline Forman
Lived to tell the story
“On my 50th birthday, my wife surprised me with a parachute jump. It was scary, and it was not something I ever thought about doing. The company provides someone for you to jump with — you’re attached to them — so they tell you what to do and it worked out fine. It was a delightful experience, I enjoyed it enough that I would do it again although my body’s getting to the point where I have to be careful what I subject it to.”
— Steve Warshaw
On the flip side
“I was 3,000 miles from home a few weeks before Thanksgiving in the 1990s. Some distant relatives in California I’d never met invited me to their home for turkey dinner. I needed to bring something, as you do, so my new co-workers suggested Mrs. See’s candies. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ they told me. When I handed the box of chocolates to my host at Thanksgiving, she tossed it aside: ‘We don’t eat this junk in our household, but I’ll give it to the mailman for Christmas.’ The way I was raised, that was considered rude, but her husband was an admiral in the Navy, so what did I know?” — Buddy Rogers
Christmas for Dummies
“A middle-aged, female family member gave me a copy of Calculus For Dummies. She knew I was taking a calculus course at the university and may or may not have known I was doing very, very poorly in the class. It didn’t help that I had a professor whose Russian accent was so thick that virtually all of the students in the class couldn’t understand him!
“I also didn’t appreciate the intimation of the word ‘dummy.’ I went to law school and showed her!! To add injury to insult, when I opened the book, I saw lots of passages which were underlined — she had given me a USED book — a horrible book and it wasn’t even new!” — Renee Skudra
Christmas Summer’s Eve
“At our house, stocking gifts are wrapped and we go around the circle taking turns opening them and showing them off. One Christmas — after I was separated, but before I was divorced — my ex-husband’s mother wrapped up and put in my stocking Summer’s Eve wipes. So I had to unwrap them and show them off in front of the whole family.” — Anonymous
Drive it into the ground
“This was in France when I was living there, and my ex thought it would be an amazing idea to give me a gift of a thumb drive for my birthday. We had been together for 2 1/2 years. We’re not together anymore.” — Sadaf Fardanesh
Gone to the dogs
“She’ll wrap our gifts in newspapers from years ago, but then she gives us magazines from the ’70s and ’80s. One of the strangest gifts I’ve gotten from her recently was an anniversary gift — a can of dog-grooming mist for our dog, mmm-hmmm. It worked really well for the dog though!” — Anonymous
In hot water
“I think my mother-in-law forgot to get me a present, so she wrapped up a bag of pasta. It was old pasta, too, not even new pasta. We never cooked it.”
— Mark Plott
Chugga-chugga-chocolate
“For one of my birthdays when I was much younger, my father made a train made out of cake — locomotive, railroad car, caboose. And I love chocolate — the locomotive was chocolate. The others were other flavors. So we get ready to eat the cake and my father says, ‘No, no, no, no! We gotta save the locomotive!’ So he puts it in the freezer and I get it the next year with two other cars. Again, my father says, ‘No, we gotta save the locomotive!’ For the third year in a row, I get the same chocolate locomotive and two other cakes. And nobody wanted the chocolate that year so we finally threw it away.” OH
— David Lozano
