Like most kids, there was nothing I loved more than my own birthday. As I grew older though, the joy of opening presents and blowing out the candles began to change – the turning point coincided with my 13th birthday, when I received a set of coasters and a container of prunes as a gift. Even at 13 I knew: there had to be more.
I know I‘m not alone in this. How much more meaningful would it be if we took the opportunity every year to not only give presents but also invite friends and family to share with others in need?
It’s in that spirit that First Book proudly unveils a new Web site offering something everyone wants: birthday gifts that give back. On the site, supporters are invited to tie charitable giving into their birthday celebrations by creating a personal Books for Keeps page online and asking friends and family to join them in donating to provide brand new books to the kids who need them most. To see the site, visit www.firstbook.org/birthdays.
To kick the site off, we’re asking you, dear readers, to join us by sharing the worst gift you’ve ever received. For each comment posted, First Book will provide one new book to a child in need.
And the icing on the cake? All participants will be entered in a random drawing to win an autographed book of their choice – Linda Sue Park’s Keeping Score, James Patterson’s The Final Warning or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Thirteenth. Share your worst gift by leaving a comment now!
Read below for the fine print…
Here’s how it works:
Everyone who posts a comment sharing their worst gift will be entered into a random drawing to win a prize – their choice of an autographed copy of one of the three following titles: Linda Sue Park’s Keeping Score, James Patterson’s The Final Warning or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Thirteenth.
The rules are as follows:
- You must comment on this blog post with the worst gift you’ve received and include your email address (your email address will not be displayed to the public).
- The winner will be selected at random from among all the comments posted and receive the prize of their choice of an autographed copy of one of the three following titles: Linda Sue Park’s Keeping Score, James Patterson’s The Final Warning or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Thirteenth.
- By posting a comment, you give First Book permission to contact you via email and highlight your name on the blog if you are selected as the winner.
- Deadline for entries is: June 30 at 12:00 midnight ET.
- The winner will be announced no later than July 1.
I believe it was Christmas of my eighth year. My parents gave me a page from the This End Up furniture catalog. It was a picture of a wooden bed frame, which I never got.
The worst gift I ever got was a magenta turtleneck, size small. It was the worst because it was the first gift my now-husband ever gave me. It didn’t fit, it was not a color I can wear without looking ill, but I could not refuse it, return it, or make it disappear. I hid it in a drawer and just kept telling him that he must just never have seen me wear it. I still feel guilty.
An XL shirt with a big Tweety bird head on it. I’m an XS and more of a Sylvester fan. Thanks, Mom.
The worst gift ever? There have been quite a few bad ones, but I think the winner might be a sweatshirt with the head of an angora cat depicted in gold glitter paired with electric-blue leggings that were puffy — get this! — from hip to KNEE, then tight and ribbed from knee to ankle. Since I usually wear the same old twinsets, boot-cut jeans, and black boots as many days of the year as possible, this was WAY off.
When I was a kid my aunt used to organize an Easter Egg Hunt for all of the cousins. In addition to chocolate eggs she would hide special gifts she’d picked out for each of us, usually all sharing a theme. One year my little cousin got those cute white tights with embroidered hearts. Being too old for embroidered tights, I got underwear!
When I was a kid my aunt used to organize an Easter Egg Hunt for all of the cousins. In addition to chocolate eggs she would hide special gifts she’d picked out for each of us, usually all sharing a theme. One year my little cousin got those cute white tights with embroidered hearts. Being too old for embroidered tights, I got underwear!
Nothing says He Has Risen quite like a pair of individually wrapped underpants jammed into a tree.
As a wedding gift we received a waffle maker that was cracked and obviously used!
In college, my mom’s husband moved from chicago to montana for work. The plan was for him to be there for a few months, and then my mom would join him. I was really upset about it, bc i would obviouly miss her alot. For Chrismas, all my gifts were Montana themed; baseball hat, tshirt, callendar, book. I thought it was a joke. Like, way to kick me when I’m down. The funny thing is, he got fired and the permanent move never happened. So then I was stuck with all my Montana themed gifts, and i have no plans to visit.
My worst gift ever came from an office party “Secret Santa” about five years ago. We had a spending limit, but most of us managed to come up with clever, appropriate gifts. Not my Santa, who gave me a single plastic candlestick. Not a candle, not a pair of candlesticks. Not even a single *nice* candlestick. No, a flimsy, glossy, tacky plastic candlestick. I felt so honored.
Might not be the worst gift I ever received, but it was the most memorably off-base, and from my oldest friend… When I was 19, she gave me a Mickey Mouse wafflemaker. Whaaaa?? I was a college sophomore, living in a dorm, childless, and thought myself pretty sophisticated.
When I was in middle school we had a classroom gift exchange for Christmas. I received a giant ceramic piggy bank. Not exactly what I wanted as a tween.
Hmm. Is it the $2 bill I received from my great-grandmother for Christmas one year? Or is it the used cheap plastic costume jewelry I received for another Christmas also from the same great-grandmother? It might be the inappropriate pair of underwear received from a guy I’d known only 4 months. Underwear I received in front of his girlfriend. Yep, that might be the worst gift.
The worst gift is a tie between princess placemats from my mother when I was 16, and a box of envelopes from my sister for Christmas (apparently she couldn’t think of anything else).
this was the most recent gift i could think of, but i wanted to write so a child could get a book! it actually happens to be a graduation gift for my sister. it was a evergreen-colored totebag with a faux alligator skin design. it was totally not my sister’s style, an awkard size and shape, and arguably ugly. she gingerly asked me, “but why would they give this to me? what am i supposed to use this for? and what made them think this was a good idea?” and so she took it to texas with her in hopes that someone else might appreciate its uniqueness. :)
My first Christmas back from college, my parents got me a pair of foot pajamas. This pajama suit was green and red fleece and two sizes too big. Clearly very appropriate sleepwear for the dorm!
I think I’ve repressed a lot of memories of the worst gifts, but this one was pretty bad:
Someone gave me a hideous fur lined hat. Real fur…and I’ve been vegetarian since I was 16 and creeped out by fur products since I was about 7 (and never much of a hat person). I had no way to return it, so I started using it as a bed for orphaned foster kittens :).
Probably de Rambo doll someone gave me as a birthday present. I never understood why the person thought a 7 year old girl would want that.
My father-in-law’s third wife or perhaps the fourth gave all three daughters-in-law a brass necklace with a dangling, jointed cowboy complete with boots, chaps, hat and guns. The seven inch cowboy hung from the chain by its neck with the head and hat at an angle. What message was she sending with this gift? I’m afraid it was only good for a gag gift.
Worst gift? That’s easy. Last year, for my 39th birthday, my husband took my son out shopping for me. They came back with a single item, to me from both of them: a “Beatles Edition” Monopoly game! That was it. Which maybe could’ve been OK if it hadn’t been my only gift, or if I actually liked Monopoly, or the themed editions (I’m a purist; give me Boardwalk, not Apple Studios or whatever). Actually, no, not even then would this have been a good gift for a woman at the end of a decade who doesn’t ever have time for herself or for little luxuries. I spent the rest of the year wondering if the next gift would show up as racy lingerie on my husband’s Amex… given to someone else!! I know it’s not about the gift, but this year had better be better!
My dad gave me shrink visits for Christmas after I had a nervous breakdown in my fall semester as a freshman at college and couldn’t complete two exams.
Then, years later, when he figured out he couldn’t claim the unclaimed funds (roughly $500) from the state for that semester’s tuition, he notified me and told me it was my birthday and Christmas present and I could claim it.
I was home-schooled from 3rd to 8th grade. I was mad about books. One Christmas I opened up what I had felt through the wrapping to be a huge book (oh, excitement!), and found my textbook for the next semester.
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When I was about 9, a friend gave me a collectible porcelain doll in a velvet dress, which my mother promptly put in the china cabinet and never let me touch. The gift I gave her (and which I desperately wanted) was a plastic My Pretty Pony with combable mane. There is no accounting for taste!
Excellent post… keep it up
My worst birthday gift ever was from my husband, a new mattress pad for our bed. It wasn’t even the right size!
A rainbow nightlight and a broken candy cane received one Christmas, it was sad – very sad.
My ex-mother-in-law gave me the most hideous item I have ever seen: a nightlight/lamp comprised of a glass globe with a large red rose preserved inside it, surrounded by ceramic red rose buds that had tiny lightbulbs tucked inside them. When you turned it on, the globe AND the buds lit up.
And the worst part was, I could tell by her expression that she thought it was absolutely GORGEOUS. She really thought she was giving me a stunningly beautiful gift.
Ugh.
The worst gift:
One Christmas, my hubby and I decided to give each other stockings filled with goodies that the other person would like. By now, we had been married about 20 years so we had a good idea of each other’s likes and dislikes. I spent weeks carefully collecting little goodies that were linked to his interests. He spent Christmas Eve night at the all-night mega-store picking up a can of green hairspray (in case I wanted to look like the Incredible Hulk) and Spanish language People magazine – I don’t speak Spanish at all and it was all about famous people in the Hispanic/Chicano culture who I don’t know.
Needless to say, we don’t do stockings for each other any more.
At an office Christmas party, we played “Dirty Santa” and there were the usual “great” gifts, “okay” gifts, and the “AWFUL” gifts. I was so excited when we were down to the last gift and I had ended up with a designer key fob, which I LOVED. Needless to say, as I was smugly sitting admiring my lovely gift , the last person got her gift, then walked over to me, took my key fob, and presented me with A WRENCH!!
One of the worst gifts I received as a kid was a little blue organizer kit–nothing wrong with that, but all the other kids (cousins) got cool KID stuff and I got that ‘because I always seemed organized’…and this was when I was 10 or younger! Then the next I can think of was a very soft throw blanket…that was a hideous green (my least liked color of all time)!! I think I ended up donating that to a “winter warmth” drive at my church. Oh well, both times were good lessons in “It’s the thought that counts!”
The worst gift I ever got was from a high school boyfriend. He forgot my birthday, but didn’t admit it. Instead, he had to pop by his house because he had “forgotten” it. He returned with earrings. Turned out he had taken this from his mom’s jewelry box! :-( (I found out when I wore them in front of her.)
I got a fuzzy cat cardigan. Enough said I think.
I was about 7 or 8 at the time, and I opened a heavy package from Christmas. I thought it was going to be really exciting, but it ended up being 3 book about the human body systems. And I was so young, I said, “Are you sure the label wasn’t address to my dad?”
My grandmother sent me what looked like a stuffed kitten (real fur and all) curled up for a nap. I have no idea what posessed her to do that but I promptly hid it in a dresser drawer and it never saw the light of day until I finally “donated” it to Goodwill.
My (now ex-) husband gave me rubber heel cups for my sore feet for my birthday when we were newly wed- not very romantic.
The worst gift I’ve ever received was a plane ticket my ex-boyfriend gave me. I flew from San Francisco to New York to spend new year’s eve with him. (I lived in SF and he lived in NY. The ticket to see him only sounds romantic and thoughtful. ) . During my time in New York his car broke down. While he was at work, I took the car to the shop to get it fixed. The bill came to be over $400. I paid for it on my credit card because he said he’d pay me back. Then on New Year’s Eve he got drunk and made out with another girl. When he was sober again, I asked him to write me a check for the car repair. He said that since he paid nearly $400. to fly me out to New York, then my footing the car bill evened out the score. He refused to pay me back. That gift of bad memories still leaves a bad taste in my mouth…
My brother presented me with a railroad spike for Chanukah one year when I was about 14
I don’t recall asking him why- just being resentful and annoyed.
Perhaps I will ask him today! that was forty years ago….
For Christmas, a friend of mine gave me a huge box of make-up from Wal-mart but the thing was that I don’t ever wear make up. I wasn’t mad or anything since she was really into make up and would probably have gotten it for herself. It did make it hard for me to decide what to do with the present though.