According to our fairly accurate calendar, our most cherished day of the year, Christmas, is a mere 45 days from today.
Which means our second most cherished holiday — the returning of all the crap we don’t want in exchange for stuff we do want — is a mere 46 days away. A good many of you are already training for this day with a daily regiment of head fakes, elbow jabs and wind sprints for the moment when stores open for The Day After.
Either I loved every Christmas present I ever received or, more likely, my shaky recall blocked memories of burlap sweaters but left the Rockem Sockem Robots, cap guns and their burns intact.
Since I’m not recollecting any particularly miserable gifts at the moment, I thought I’d call on some friends to ask them to share their memories of Christmas gifts gone awry. As expected, they stepped up.
This morn I called a Methuen health practitioner with my query. He immediately lobbed it to his girlfriend nearby. And replied with:
“Not me, but Debbie got a scale from her mother-in-law. Seriously? You know how thin she is!”
“You’re never too slender to lose more weight” was the message apparently, and wickedly helpful since women love being reminded of their weight.
Christine periodically calls me with her latest life fiasco that always concludes with both ends of the call erupting with laughter. We find humor and irony in all the same places. So I reached out to my longtime friend inquiring about odd gifts. She pondered it for a spell and responded thusly:
“Oh, I know. Several years ago (my husband) got me a pressure cooker after I specifically said they scare the (heck) out of me. He didn’t remember that and my father-in-law Rob thought I was the worst when I opened it and said, ‘You know I hate these!’ He mailed me a newspaper clipping the following week about being a gracious gift recipient. He was a character. I forgot all about that. What a typical sh-t show.”
Larry is the male counterpart to Christine. If there wasn’t a nugget of nonsense stored somewhere in his memory banks, then I’m going to need new friends.
And sure enough, tasked with something that would make me — and hopefully you — laugh, Larry recalled this wry anecdote:
“You know how kids pick names and you have to buy gifts for them?” he began.
“You mean Secret Santa?”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, the mom of the kid who picked my name wasn’t told. So at the (school’s) Christmas party I received a handful of Bic pens with an elastic holding them together. At least they weren’t chewed yet so they might have been new. I was about 10. Pretty disappointing that I got a bunch of pens.”
My brother Bruce is a solid target for weird clothing gifts.
“Do you remember the year Aunt Marti knitted socks for all of us?” he asked. “Knee-high knitted socks!”
“Are you sure this wasn’t just a random nightmare?”
“No. She knitted hats and socks.”
Knee-high socks may look perfectly normal on Girl Scouts or Campfire Girls. But on the Whipple brothers, festively colored knee-high socks look absurdly out of place … without racing stripes. So the leggings were boycotted, according to Bruce.
You know what’s worse than un-striped knee socks? Matching olive drab-colored sweatshirts that I presented to Bruce and his wife Anne one Christmas. They appeared to love them right up until the moment they had a clear path to the attic. The sweatshirts shot from, “We love them!” to a dark corner of the attic without even passing through the bedroom.
The story goes neither Goodwill nor a homeless encampment were interested in having a pair of matching dark-green sweatshirts on the premises.
Finally, we conclude with my friend Ellen’s contributions. Like the other characters in our tale, Ellen attracts nonsense year-round with additional shares arriving around Christmas.
“The silliest gift I was given was this English bone china cow-shaped pitcher for formal dinner parties. You hold the cow by the tail and it pours from the cow’s mouth. Cute to look at, but very off-putting. The few times I used it people got nauseous and didn’t finish dessert.”
To prove that odd gift receiving is generational, Ellen adds this fine memory of her son:
“When Owen was little, his godfather gave him an electronic Santa that bent over and farted bubbles. Owen kept making fart noises at Christmas Mass, so we had to take it away and he had a meltdown.”
There you have it, this year’s installment of Christmas Gifts Gone Wrong.
That about does it for me. I’m off to Annie’s Walmart or whatever it’s called, to purchase Noel Edition Bic Pen Clusters for the special people in my life.
