Yahoo News The worst Christmas gifts we’ve ever received
It is a truth universally accepted that every classic Christmas film must contain an element of tear-jerking poignancy. The 1946 masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life still has the power to reduce strong men to tears. But for many of the nation’s women (particularly wives), it is Love Actually that sets us sobbing with anguish.
Director Richard Curtis may look back at his 2003 work and feel awkward at the lack of diversity (so outmoded, so wrong) and the questionable sexual politics of Downing Street (par for the course, eh Mr Hancock?).
The rest of us are too focused on the scenes of domestic anguish to take much notice of his revisionism. The moment when a smiling Emma Thompson receives her present from on-screen husband, Alan Rickman, already knowing he has bought a beautiful piece of jewellery, then opens the package to reveal a Joni Mitchell CD, our hearts break with her. Rickman has given the necklace to someone else; the woman about to become (or who already is) his lover.
After taking a few moments to have a weep, a stoical Thompson puts on a brave face. But inside she’s dying. As are we.
Of course, most Christmas gifts do not trigger relationship cataclysm. Mostly, they are met with an eye-roll or a rictus smile and promptly placed on the regifting pile, to be forgotten.
But every now and then a present is so awful it enters the realm of family folklore. Below, Telegraph writers share their most memorable festive fails…
If there’s one thing I dislike, it is a neat rectangular present. Always have. Always will. Christmas gifts should be oval, like a box of French chocolates. Or round, like an extraordinary lampshade, or an amorphous bundle, it being downright impossible to wrap something quite so silky or slinky.
But my husband loves a rectangular gift. A square. A cube. Both to receive and to give.
When we were courting, I’d wake up to as many as 20 presents (what can I say, other than I was a lot more fun then?). Unfortunately, they would be stacked so neatly as to make my heart sink: obscure Mitteleuropean novels I didn’t want to read, CDs I didn’t want to hear, desk calendars, mouse mats… and once, a book entitled The Potato Year. Because I’m Irish? Yes, because I’m Irish. Bless.
In truth it was more the contours than the content that irked – a bag of actual spuds would have been funny. And more useful.
As the decades have gone by and most of our festive energies are poured into children’s stocking fillers, there are far fewer grown-up goodies to be joyfully ripped open.
Then a few years ago, my husband pointed to a special something for me under the tree. It looked like a Minotaur’s head. Or maybe half a Gloucester Old Spot. I was giddy with excitement! What could it possibly be?
Turned out it was the garden shears, a tablecloth and the dog’s bowl carefully chosen to disguise – a rectangular iPad. An achingly sweet reminder that love comes in many shapes. Actually.
I love my husband dearly but I think even he’d agree that his gifts can be a rather hit-and-miss affair.
When advised by my girlfriends, he always comes up trumps and I have benefited from an eBay-bought Chanel handbag and some beautiful gold earrings in the past.
But there was one gift that became memorable for all the wrong reasons. Clearly having forgotten to get me anything – he went one better than petrol station flowers by buying me a Victoria sponge from Marks and Spencer.
To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even a full-sized cake but one of those tiny ones that you can only slice into three minuscule pieces.
Clearly he’d got to Marylebone station and panicked. It was either that or a pasty from Upper Crust and he had gone for the least admin-intensive option.
When I later pointed out that M&S sells boxes of luxury chocolates, he attempted to justify the cake purchase by arguing it was “more celebratory”.
There was also one Christmas when, inexplicably, he bought me a pair of stripy flip-flops from Accessorize.
The place is full of (albeit inexpensive) jewellery and he chooses out-of-season footwear?
To be fair, they were very “me” and I went on to cherish them simply because he had ventured out of his station shopping comfort zone.
Now he largely works from home, I have no idea what “surprises” this Christmas will bring. I look forward to receiving one of my own mugs.
As I opened the gift presented to me in a little gold box it took me a moment to make sense of what I was looking at. “A Skin Resurfacing Voucher” for one of Beverly Hills’ top cosmetic surgeons.
“Do away with skin blemishes such as fine lines and wrinkles, sun damage, uneven pigmentation, enlarged pores and acne scars forever!”, the small print enthused. “This unique laser skin resurfacing treatment holds the solution to all your woes.”
I tried to rearrange my facial expression from a combination of horror, disbelief and mirth into the appropriate expression of gratitude, before stammering out my thanks.
I was new to LA at the time, and the extravagantly “resurfaced” lady offering me “the solution” to woes that I never realised I had, was a new friend. What she said next only made it worse: “I promise, this will change your life. Dr X is the best.”
There I was, blithely going about my daily life, not, apparently, knowing that all around me people were laughing and pointing, whispering to one another: “Someone really needs to buy that girl a new face.”
I never used the voucher – it was only a fraction of the cost of the full treatment and because we Brits tend to be more at ease with our crags and pigmentation than our LA counterparts (and I happen to find those enlarged pores rather useful for keeping loose change).
And because back home, when people can’t think of what to give you at Christmas, they just give you a scented candle. At least that, you can re-gift.
Back when you were single, you always knew when a relationship was sputtering towards the finishing line by the state of the Christmas present.
In the early days you often got something nice and thoughtful. I once got a pair of shoes I’d admired in the window of a shop I wouldn’t have dared set foot in for fear of being sales assistant snobbed.
Another time, I was presented with a plane ticket to Antigua that was wrapped inside a mug. Those were the high points, which made the end game presents all the more depressing.
A couple of years later the shoe man gave me a stoneware salt dispenser, one of those ones with a gaping mouth that you dip into with a little wooden spoon. That was it. And I never cooked. I now wonder if it was, in fact, a salt dispenser but what else could it have possibly been?
(Although I have a girlfriend who recently gave someone what she believed to be a decorative bottle top – it turned out to be an – ahem – butt plug. Absolutely true.)
The plane ticket man capped this some years later by giving me a smellies gift set that included bath oil, handmade soaps and other sundry scented delights.
This was the black-spot of presents, whatever way you looked at it. The highly-scented bathtime basket is what girls give their granny, but man-to-woman it says: “This Will Have To Do”.
And man-to-this-particular-woman, it sounded more like “I Have No Idea Who You Are” – because I had galloping eczema. Something a boyfriend couldn’t have failed to notice, and so much as a lightly scented washing powder would leave me looking like I’d been in a bush fire.
So, that was my worst present ever. Not just thoughtless, but painfully so.
I had what we might politely describe as a tricky relationship with my mother. Doubtless she loved me, but she didn’t really ever “get” me. When I moved to London she came round to my flat and said: “It will look a lot better when it is furnished.”
But it was furnished. Just not in the working-class style of cramming as much furniture into a room as possible with china ornaments on every shelf.
For Christmas, my mother then bought me a frying pan that was divided into three sections. The idea was that you could just use the one pan on the one gas ring. It was, she explained, for “sad lonely people who live in bedsits”.
By that time I had two children and a column in a national newspaper. But, as my mother informed me, it was not a paper they got in Ipswich.
To make matters worse, she bought me the weird pan the following year and the next. There was little point in saying anything.
From the lonely frying pan and into the fire of a partner’s gift of underwear, it’s hard to decide which was worse. Men and underwear. Really just say no.
He bought me a pair of grey silk camiknickers. They were lovely actually – if they hadn’t been Size 26 or thereabouts. Does my bum look big in this? Not nearly as big as in his warped imagination, clearly.
We are no longer together, you will be shocked to know.
John is my oldest friend, which is to say the friend I’ve known the longest, from being in the Cubs, the Scouts – the 22nd Purley troop, if I remember correctly – through marriages, children and grandchildren to the present day.
At the age of 12 or 13 it was a friendship that consisted of riding bikes, kicking a football around and occasionally engaging in mock wrestling matches, involving one or other of us pleading to be released from a choke hold before death occurred.
It was not a friendship steeped in sentimentality, which made it all the more surprising when at Christmas he presented me with a gift: a 45rpm single entitled Cheat Cheat, by a singer called Bick Ford.
Why this record in particular, I’ve no idea. I suspected even then that it had been a present from an elderly relative that John was passing off to me in a show of uncharacteristic largesse.
Cheat Cheat was what a record reviewer of the day might have described as a mid-tempo toe-tapper. Bick Ford was actually Robert Bickford, a Daily Mail reporter who was put up for mentoring by the impresario Robert Stigwood, with a view to following each step of his progress towards stardom.
The song was written and arranged by Charles Blackwell, who worked with everybody from Billy Fury to Shirley Bassey. Shortly before working on Cheat Cheat, he had acted as the musical director for Jimmy Savile’s Ahab The Arab, an unfortunate blot on an otherwise distinguished musical career, and which Blackwell’s Wikipedia entry notes that – for too many reasons to mention – “today would be regarded as too offensive to broadcast”.
Of course, I knew nothing of this at the time. All I knew was that Cheat Cheat was terrible – a judgment borne out by the fact that while Robert Stigwood went on to enjoy global success promoting the Bee Gees, Cheat Cheat vanished without trace, and a wiser and sadder Bick Ford presumably returned to the Daily Mail newsdesk.
A few months later it was John’s birthday. What to do?
Searching around for a suitable gift, I chanced upon Cheat Cheat, wrapped it and presented it to him. After all, I’d only played it once.
He looked – rather ungraciously, I thought – underwhelmed. But life went on: bikes, football, near-death choke holds.
And then it was Christmas. When John presented me with a wrapped gift in the shape of a 45rpm single, I didn’t even need to open it.
Thinking on this recently, I found Cheat Cheat on YouTube and listened to it for the first time in more than 50 years. “This is the end,” the lyrics run. “We’re not even friends.” But happily, we still are.
Unlike all the poor souls above, I’ve never received, or given, a terrible Christmas gift. This is not because my family and I are models of impeccable good taste. It’s because we never give anyone a present they haven’t explicitly asked for.
Six weeks before Christmas, we send each other emails specifying what we’d like to be given, including a link to a website it can be ordered from. All the giver has to do is click “buy”. That’s it.
This may sound impersonal and unromantic and out of keeping with the spirit of Christmas. But it does at least avoid waste, in two senses of the word. No one wastes any money, and no unwanted plastic tat ends up in landfill.
Anyway, it’s essentially just an adult version of what children do. They make a list of the presents they’d like, and send it to Father Christmas. We make a list of the presents we’d like, and send them to each other. And since, unbeknownst to the children, we ourselves are Father Christmas, it amounts to the same thing.
So, if you’d like to avoid being lumbered with a revolting jumper or a celebrity perfume, take my tip – and have a happy, and extremely predictable, Christmas.
