When my brothers, sisters and I were kids our tight arse parents used to give us school uniforms and school bags for christmas, wrapped up under the tree and everything.
they'd be sitting there under the tree in the weeks before and each of us would walk past, point to a present and say, 'school bag, school clothes, school shoes'
to which mum would exhort, 'Don't ruin the suprise'
mum could never understand why we were never excited about christmas.
One year when i was 14, she gave me this soft spongey K-mart boogie board with plastic fins that were held into place by lugs that were pushed through the deck..
nevermind that my uncle, her brother in law, was a surfboard shaper and had been giving me surfboards since I was 8. I had never even expressed the remotest interest in riding a boogie board.
turns out it had been handed into the lost and found of the local shopping centre she managed and had been sitting there gathering dust for over two years.
I'm not complaining, my parents worked hard to give us everything they could and taught us the value of family and whats really important, its just mums got no idea.
(for example, my 2 year old niece got a bookmark with some hallmark whispy poem on it, mum thought she'd appreciate it when she got older...)
now that we're all grown up, my brothers and sisters get together this time of year and laugh for hours about the no idea, tight arse, penny pinching present buying antics of my mum which still come forth to this day..
last year my brother got a lowes brand collared shirt in see through white, sized medium... he's 6'3" and 110kgs; and I got a pair of mens ankle socks (because apparently thats the fashion these days)
so whats your worst present...?
Lol doctor Nothing says i love you more than a GARDEN GNOME! These handy fellas can be used as a christmas present birthdays presents!
Growing up I hated Christmas.
I was raised inn a religion that never had Christmas or birthdays. So on Christmas day, when all my mates and neighbours were riding around on their new bikes, shooting piwi's with their new air rifles and surfing on their new boards, I was wishing there was no God so I could get something.
Even a school uniform would have been nice 
Still had a better life than 2/3 of the world.
My ol' man works for an auto part company.
Every year without fail I get something that has been returned (after being opened - and ens up in my hands. Most of which is never used as i am a bit of a gumby with tools 
especially those missing the crucial part.
Dad also forgets (or chooses not to remember) he gave me the same prezzie the year before.
Last count I had 4 diff socket sets. Ha ha - I end up using the cheapy set twice a year as it is the most compact and easiest to carry.
I draw the line at free promo cr@p that has been palmed off on me and the squids before (rubbish monaro clock that didn't even function).
Serves me right for all those socks n jocks I gave him for father's day I spose.
Grey tie with purple pasley pattern in that crinkly clear plastic wrap - a la' $2 shop
Awful white rope cable knit sleevless jumper vest (I don't play, watch or like cricket)
Some multi coloured mis-shapen hessian long sleeve shirt following an African holiday...
...all from the in-laws; who got quite upset when they asked if I liked it and I said 'No'. Obviously, I was supposed to lie to them...
(Oh, and my mother got me a novelty Santa tie (a week before Christmas) that she seriously expected me to wear to the office - and was upset when I said it was going straight into the Salvo bin).
Needless to say I have implemented a total ban on all clothing based gifts!
pink rose soap from my then 12yr old sister, gave it back to her the following year...
My Auntie gave me a plastic tube with a lid (used to contain film for a camera) with 5 x 10 pence pieces in it. The following year she gave me a blank tape of (15 minutes each side).
The worst story I heard. A work colleague had a mate who rode the Adelaide Toy Run a few years back (a Christmas charity for kids). His present was a rock wrapped up in Christmas paper.
I got 2 really hideous shirts from my wife one year. Im still stunned that she thought I would wear them. They were so bad i couldnt just put them in the cupboard. Having got the cold shoulder for having said they were awful, i was given the till receipt and told to go and exchange them for something I liked.
thats when I commented on how much they cost!. $30 each!!!!.
when I rocked up to the store the salesmen asked me why I wanted to exchange them , and I just said they were bloody awful, he allowd me a store credit, so I wandered around the shop and realized that the shop was full of the same bad wog fashions.
In the end I got a voucher for the chain of stores and gave it to my brother in law as a birthday present.
he has this great story about how one of his relatives( he doesnt know it was me)gave him a $60 voucher for his birthday and when he got to the store it was full of really hideous fashions, so he bought years worth of socks and jocks instead.
i like to remind wifey of this sad tale every year before christmas, just so she will think first before buying anything
Age 4 I got a playtex (huge in my eyes) cross your heart bra
in a brown paper bag. I thought santa had gone nuts and did not want to come out from behind the lounge chair as I just could not figure that if he got this present wrong he must have gotten them all wrong
Could not figure out for the life of me why Mum and dad were laughing at me so much.
oh and yes xmas with the extended family in years to come just ended up a sh ite fight on xmas day not a xmas type of person..I like to give presents all year round
I got a christmas cracker from a work college this year who 'just really wanted to say thanks for everything' .... Cracker was meant to be ornamental!! haha I pulled it apart with another work college to find nothing inside.. worst present ever. not even a crack noise, nothing.. haha Who the fark wants an ornamental cracker. I much prefer elephant jokes about trunks and the like. haha
My wife's grandmother (bless her, the ol' dear) each year gives us a shoebox...in it, and the contents sometimes varied, but always a similar theme.
1/ roll of toilet paper (no wrapper, single-ply)
1/small (100ml) bottle of laundry detergent
3/cans of varied substances - baked beans, soup, spag etc.
1/ bar of soap
approx 10/nescafe single coffee satchels (borrowed from cheap motel room)
approx 10/sugar single satchels (as above...or from cafe)
approx 5/KFC wet-wipes (wtf!)
a small box of tissues
and a dishwashing cloth!
Regardless, this pressie was always met with a kiss on cheek, and "oh, thanks Nan...just what we need!" 
my brother & i both got these board shorts off our rather large aunty that were so big both of us hoped into one pair & we still had room for more people she said dont worry you will grow into them .Unfortunatly as i did not become a 400kg sumo wrestler they still dont fit me .enough material in them to make a truck tarp .I would love to know were she got them maybe at sumo surf city
Last year me mum gave me my old school reports* in a small cardboard box.
My birthday is 2 days before xmas so I thought I was pretty used to this sort of stunt, but I suppose the old wounds get easier to open as I age...
(* the same reports which I had told her to chuck out when she mentioned she had found them somewhere)
My worst present was the the "magic hat" I was about 12years old. It was a huge plastic top hat with a trapdoor in the bottom with a stuffed rabbit and a wand with a groove in it that you could roll a marble along when I opened it i looked straight at my old man he looked at my old lady and said" I told you he would hate it". All my mates were getting mongoose bmx with tuffs I was totally devastated.
cheers boof
my redhead girlfriend told me about when her grandma got her a redhead cabbage patch doll. the bullying for being a redhead had been underway for a couple of years by then, so she didn't want the doll and started crying on christmas morning.
I was a spoilt kid and most of the time got expensive presents. I never asked for anything over board, I was just spoilt You will all remember the BMX craze, if you didn't have one, you were NOTHING. One xmas I asked for one, nothing fancy, noting overboard, just a normal BMX. I did get a bike for xmas, however it was a very expensive gay racing bike with matching helmet and racing clothes. I was devistated 
To this day my folks don't understand why I did not want the racing bike that was 10 times the price of a BMX 
