^^Hmm, might have been useless, but I would still treasure something personal picked out or made for me by my father. Life is short.
My mom, the classic health food nut circa 1965, tends to give me books on various esoteric healing theories. Less charitably, I’d call them crackpot, though I do have a very vague interest in such topics My favorite title, was Left for Dead. Or there is Healing the Hopeless.
re #30. Fast forward to this year and the local club- some of us are very liberal and, well, some of the upper middle class ladies are more traditional and not the kind of Republican my friend is- I avoid my comments about politics…
My Hindu sister-in-law and her family were visiting us one Christmas and gave gifts as they also did the secular Christmas things. My H got some nice Ugg slippers- very nice gift. I received one of those sealer devices for foods- how impersonal and not something at all useful. Like those tales of wives getting things for their work in the kitchen. It got returned.
I’ve told this story before, but once when I was pregnant my then husband got me a talking scale. He paid a lot of money for it, and thought I should be very excited about it, but it went back.
our local drug store (Osco) once had these big brown grab bags for sale - like $10 a piece filled with clearance items. I bought one thinking it’d be fun for my sister-in-law’s BF for Christmas.
We had no idea what was in it, but he was such a good sport. We all laughed till we cried with the random items! You know- strange things on the end caps. He received make up, baby products, foot cream, almost expired food items, art/office things, and those very odd medical things and products found at all drug stores.
he actually got such a kick out of it that he sacked up all the items and re-gifted the bag to his own grown daughter.
It’s very common among evangelical women to give their friends super racy underwear (and sometimes other, um, marital enhancements) as a bridal shower gift. Usually, it’s just women in the room, so no one gets embarrassed. Well, my brother’s devout Mennonite wife sent me a very racy teddy (as in, it was mostly holes connected with thread) for Christmas, not my shower, when I was engaged, and I opened it in front of my future husband’s family. I was more amused than embarrassed, but my FIL was mortified.
@busdriver11 - you are so right. I don’t have it anymore, but I still enjoy the memory of my dad giving me a salad shooter. He had seen it on tv and thought it was a clever gizmo and that I needed it. He never bought gifts, never. I am still touched by it…even though I really never used it.
I would love to get one of those. 
Occasion: wedding shower for my now dil
Guests: youngest was about 2…oldest mid nineties
Gift: a black and red hooker bra
My reaction? Ugly as sh**. Just change the lace color for sexy and beautiful…but no
matter
Mom of bride…offended
Lol, @HImom ! I’m guessing your gift givers shopped at a discount place like TJMAXX, and all they had left were the larger sizes. Or they were like my own dear spouse, who for the first years of our marriage, thought that a size medium would be fine for a size 2 woman…you know, a medium is like hedging your bets.,
My cousins naturally fall into age groupings, and I’m part of the five youngest. At some point when we were kids, we decided to start exchanging Christmas presents with each other. When you’re kids, it’s easy to pick out cheap exchange gifts. As we got into our teen years, it was getting a little harder for the boys. We all must have asked my aunt for suggestions for her son, the oldest of the five of us. She told each of us separately that since he was now responsible for buying his own toiletries that those types of things would be a good gift for him. I still feel bad to this day that he was so disappointed as he opened what should have been fun gifts from the cousins and instead found things like aftershave, deodorant, shampoo, etc!
@TranquilMind - I got a toilet seat once, too. I didn’t appreciate it, as it also came with a toilet brush, a box of Tidy Bowl, a shag toilet seat cover, and a bathroom rug - that did not even match the seat cover! I remember thinking how crude are my in-laws, are they suggesting my house is not clean? Apparently I wasn’t supposed to open it without them - they were coming to visit us on New Years, and had told our pups to open the gifts. When they finally arrived, I had calmed down, and just chalked it up to their wacky sense of humor. Then they told us they just wanted us to have something to unwrap, but the “real” gift was that they were going to pay for us to renovate our bathroom, replace the tub enclosure with a real tub, new nice fixtures, replace cracked linoleum with tile, etc. So perhaps you only got part of your gift?
Nope, H and SisIL really had no idea about sizing. Rarely saw SIL (she lived in CA and we in HI) and she assumed as she needed larger sizes as she aged, so would I.
H was and still is clueless about women’s sizes. He just bought the ring because it was the prettiest in the hotel’s display case in the jewelry store! Sizing never occurred to him and he knew our dear friend us a jeweler and can size most things. I have gotten him to stop buying me jewelry and clothing. If I want something, I shop alone or we go together. He has nice taste but is size-challenged.
As for sizing, my SIL used to complain that her husband would buy her a small bra and large panties, and she asked him to buy her a large bra, and small panties. She said she wanted to go back and exchange them on her own time…but she wanted to imagine that her husband thought of her differently…
I bought my mom one of the food sealer machines, as recommended by cc posters! She loves it and uses it all the time. I would like most of the “impersonal” things mentioned on here. I’d far prefer something I would use over “pretty things” or someone else picking out my clothes. I don’t need trinkets (see Bag a Week thread…).
Most of all, I’m with the previous poster who said he/she hates to receive and give presents. I hate people watching me, seeing if I “like” the gift, and I don’t want to disappoint my gift recipient.
My husband for a long time wanted to buy me something unlike what I had already, I had to explain that the closer it is to something I already own the more likely I am to like it.
My dil asked for a food saver.
My H once presented us all with boxes of kleenex.
Count your blessings!
I hate Puffs with Lotion. H would have bought me those…once he bought me the exact same Precious Moment figurine for my birthday and Christmas. My birthday is is mid-November…yeah…
and our first anniversary he got me a radar detector. Ahem,…I was not the one who was a speeder. maybe I see now why gifts aren’t all that fun for me.
One of my earliest memories of shopping for some occasion with my mom for dad was buying a bag of roasted peanuts in the shell and a golf magazine for him (mom’s choices). I guess we were quite poor and mom was practical. Dad acted delighted. He liked buying mom very expensive, nice clothing. For some reason, he never registered that she refused to wear anything but long dresses and slacks due to her varicose veins and often bought her short dresses and long dresses with long slits in them that were promptly returned. She has several closets of lovely clothing to this day that she never wears.