What do you do when you get a really, really bad birthday present?
Do you grin and bear it? Do you cry? Do you throw a hissy fit because you didn’t get what you wanted?
I think the best thing to do when you get an awful gift is just to smile, say “thank you!”, and then throw that item in the dumpster as soon as that person leaves your house.
It’s as easy as that!
AskReddit users open up about the worst birthday gifts people ever gave them.
1. Do you like it?
“My own scarf.
Yes, that’s right, my mother went into my room took my only scarf, wrapped it and gave it to me like it was a new scarf.”
2. I think it was used…
“My grandma got me a hairbrush with a plastic horse head handle.
The horse head was all chipped up and there was hair in the brush.”
3. Hmmm…
“A pair of homemade custom pajamas.
Only problem was that they weren’t made yet. It was just the fabric and a promise to make them for me.
I had to give the fabric back and I never got the pajamas.”
4. This again?
“My grandparents have been gifting me (and my brother) the same set of three vice grips for almost 10 years.
Collectively we have 60 vice grips. I don’t know if they bought a pallet of them, or where they are coming from.
GET A GRIP GRANDMA!”
5. This is awful.
“Thought I was getting a bike for my 15th birthday but my foster parents announced that they were sending me to a group home after living with them for 11 years.
Devastation!”
6. What am I supposed to do with this?
“An ex-boyfriend hyped up my birthday gift for days, so I was pumped.
On my birthday, he presented me with a small, flat box. Inside was a passport. His passport. That’s it. Just his passport.
No tickets for a trip, no promises of a trip once we saved up together.
He literally just gifted me his passport.
I’m still baffled.”
7. Uh oh.
“My dad accidentally revealing that him and my mom were separating.
He was on a bender and didnt realize he was texting me and not my mom.
Happy 18th to me.”
8. Not a good sign.
“My ex celebrated my first birthday that we were together by completely ignoring it altogether the day after going all out for her friend’s birthday the day before.
She offered me a leftover piece of the birthday cake she got for her friend, but still never said “happy birthday”. That should have been my signal to run because it never got any better.”
9. OH MY GOD.
“I got a credit card for my 18th birthday and told not to use it because it wasn’t “active yet”.
When I landed my first real corporate job at 2 years old the company ran a credit report on me and found out I had $350K line opened.
Turns out my father had tricked me into signing a co-mortgage, and not credit card paperwork on my 18th bday.
I received Debt on my 18th bday.”
10. Total disaster.
“Husband forgot my birthday, took the day off when he remembered (I was working from home), went to buy something and took maybe ten minutes tops in the store.
Bought roses from the grocery store while he was there buying himself cigarettes. He came home with a DVD box set he’d been dying to watch, and the new CD from a band I’d not only lost interest in but had been saying I’d lost interest in for ages. Not that he let me listen to CDs anyway, since he hated my taste in music.
Then he spent the rest of the day celebrating the birthday of his online friend while I was working from home. They’re married now.”
11. Here you go!
“A used DVD of The Notebook after I explicitly told the person that I had no intention of watching it.
Bonus: it was my step mom who gave it to me. From her and my dad’s DVD collection…that was in our living room and I could have grabbed at anytime to watch.”
12. Thanks?
“One year my husband got me a bag with stuff from the $1 store. Not even stuff I would want.
Like a notebook and a coupon organizer and a few other things. Maybe $5 of junk.
We had no money troubles that would prevent him from getting me a present.”
13. You must have been thrilled.
“This year my mother in law went through the effort of intricately wrapping a box of Ziploc bags for my birthday…. For Christmas it was a box of trash bags.
I’m so confused how I ended up as the guy who gets small boxes of bags as gifts. It almost feels offensive.”
14. You want to do this NOW?
“My mother in law showed up and said “get ready, I booked you for glamour shots in an hour.”
A few weeks after having a baby. I declined. I think she always hated me after that but felt like she hated me at the time.”
15. I don’t want this!
“In high school I got really into learning guitar.
All I had at the time was a beat-up acoustic. My birthday came around, and a wrapped present – a fairly large box – appeared in my parent’s living room. For some reason I became convinced: it was an amp! My parents must’ve gotten me an electric guitar!
They didn’t. It was a blender.”
Now we want to hear from you.
What’s the absolute WORST birthday gift you’ve ever received?
Tell us all about it in the comments!
