loading . . . The Gifts That Keep on Giving _Happy holidays, readers! Today we’ve got a special group post for you — a roundup of the best and worst gifts we’ve ever received. Enjoy! (And please post yours in the comments for the enjoyment of all). We’ll be back bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in 2026._
**Jenny**
The best and worst gifts were both from my spouse. Worst first: He gave me a beautifully wrapped little box to open at a restaurant on my birthday and inside was an ugly shark-tooth necklace bought by a teenage me at the beach that HE DUG OUT FROM MY OWN JEWELRY COLLECTION. He thought he was very funny. I was less amused. (I think I’ve shared this story in a previous “worst gifts” post. It’s still the worst.)
Best: Husband’s favorite car as a young person was the Mazda RX7 (he had one when I met him, in fact), which was also my favorite as a teen. (Did we fall in love over a sexy sports car? It didn’t hurt.) For those not in the auto know, the RX7 has a unique rotary engine designed by a dude named Felix Wankel. (It’s also called the Wankel engine. You’re welcome.) So John went down some rabbit holes online, as one does, in search of rotary-engine-themed jewelry. What he found is a heavy metal pendant that I love and wear a lot. It sparks lots of questions since nobody knows what the heck it is. (He got matching silver earrings, too.)
**Ann**
My best gift was a tutu, white under-netting, pink netting over the top, bodice of black velvet with sequins. My grandmother made it. I was maybe 7 years old and had likely flunked out of ballet class by then. To reassure you, my tastes have moved on. But at the time the tutu was the incarnation not only of my unfitness for ballet, which I accepted, but also of the endlessness of my velvety, sequined longings. Surely someday, please, someday. Tastes change but endless longings sometimes hang around for life.
**Betsy**
One of the best gifts I ever received is something I’ve used nearly every day since my boyfriend (now husband) gave it to me 13 years ago. The Stein of Science combines two things I love: cold beer and science. My beer stays fridge-cold for hours. It’s like magic. The stein is one of those material items that reminds me that while stuff is just stuff, some stuff can bring joy. It makes me smile every time I use it (even if it is mostly for NA beers these days).
The stein is made from a laboratory-grade glass Dewar flask by a former cryogenics technician. The flask was invented in 1892 by Scottish scientist John Dewar, who came up with the idea of keeping things cold by surrounding them with a partial vacuum enclosed between two layers of glass that are coated with silver or another shiny metal to reflect heat. Dewar was the first to create liquid hydrogen, and he used the flask to keep gases at temperatures cold enough to form liquids, long enough to study their properties (work that earned him Nobel nominations, but never the prize).
“It is quite common to fill [a Dewar flask] with liquid nitrogen, let it sit on the lab bench, and when you come back three days later there will still be liquid nitrogen in it,” writes Phillip Broughton, the creator of the Stein of Science. “Now imagine what it can do for beer.”
Because Dewar decided not to patent the vacuum flask, many scientists adapted it (and it is still used in labs to this day). It wasn’t long before a German glassblower turned the idea into a commercial beverage container in 1904 and called it a Thermos.
The Stein of Science
**Emily**
_Worst gift_ : Any noise-making toy that someone gives a toddler without _enthusiastic_ parental permission is, by definition, the worst gift. Don’t do it, people!
**Richard**
Best gift: Shortly after my future wife and I met, and apropos of no official occasion, she gave me a simple silver ring, which I placed on the appropriate finger on my right hand. A couple of years later, a golden wedding ring took up residence on the mirror finger on my left hand. I love the symmetry. I don’t know that I notice it every day, but I notice it often enough that it’s what came to mind via this favorite-gift prompt.
Worst gift: I have a counterintuitive example. All I wanted for Christmas 1964 was a Give-a-Show Projector.
Which I got!
Back in school in January, my fellow first-graders and I gathered in the basement auditorium/lunchroom and took turns presenting our favorite holiday gifts to our classmates. I had my Give-a-Show Projector ready to give a show! A four-panel, similar-to-a-comic-strip projection of cartoon frames. And then somebody else showed off a Give-a-Show Projector. The usurpation was devastating in the moment, of course, but it makes sense upon reflection. And, if I’m being honest with myself, it probably made sense in the moment, since a Give-a-Show Projector was one of the hottest holiday gifts of the year. Why wouldn’t somebody whose name was earlier in the alphabet than mine beat me to it?
The class ran long. And like a late-night talk-show guest sitting in the green room monitoring the feed, I watched my bit get cut.
Still, my material would have killed. Fred Flinstone delivering a punchline in the fourth panel of a projection on a concrete underground wall beneath a church on the Northwest Side of Chicago in January 1965?
Okay, and with apologies to my wife, maybe my best gift ever, after all.
**Jessa**
Best Gift: My best friend Briana sat through hour upon hour of my stressing about my CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) exams. There are three of them—all with low pass rates—and the second one is the hardest. It took me seven years to take all of them. When I finally arrived to sit my level 2 exam, the invigilator snatched my calculator on the way in and reset it to factory settings, with the result that all values were now limited to 2 significant digits. I had no idea how to switch it back.
I returned from that exam dazed and dejected, telling Briana I might as well have used a potato for a calculator. When months later I was stunned to learn that I had passed anyway, I got a congratulatory card in the mail from Briana, along with a little calculator in the shape of a carrot, for my next exam. I will treasure that piece of orange plastic forever.
Worst Gift: I can’t remember a terrible gift I’ve received, but I recently gave a gift that was more of an apology than anything. My grandmother wrote, illustrated and self-published a children’s book at the age of 96 and dedicated it to my baby son, her great-grandson. It was about a community of mice who, like my grandmother, enjoyed Scottish country dancing, and who improvised their furniture and musical instruments and such out of the various human artifacts in the house (mittens, spoons, etc).
This was passed to me somewhat later by my cousin, but it was still squarely in the time period when the book might have been treasured as a family bedtime ritual. I could have read it to the kid. At least once. For some reason, I put it on a shelf instead and forgot about it until I was packing for a recent move. “Did you know you have a book dedicated to you?” I said to my now 16-year-old son, who was heading out the door to meet his girlfriend. “Here you go.” “Oh. That’s pretty cool.”
**Cassie**
I’ve got a gift that was both the best and worst. I once received a tiny hammock for my head that had flaps on the sides that were speakers for the built-in radio. It was meant to be a hammock-pillow for the beach. Best because, really, what could be weirder? Worst because gifts that are too niche are always pretty much useless. You have to 1. find a place to store said item, 2. anticipate an upcoming situation in which said item could be useful, 3. remember you own said item, and, of course, 4. remember to bring said item to that event/outing/etc. Really, really unlikely it will happen.
**Craig**
Any gifts that were the best _and_ the worst? I’ve got a pair of taxidermy mountain lions that were both. My stepdad years back took me to a divorce-abandoned house in the mountains in Colorado where the door was unlocked and inside was a big cat mounted on a fake boulder, one paw up for a swipe, snout set into a snarl. I said we should liberate it, but I never followed through. A decade later, it showed up wrapped in cardboard and holiday paper. He liberated it and gave it to me for Christmas. Though I appreciate the care and artistry that goes into taxidermy, I find things like this creepy, and now I am the lifelong caretaker of this plastic-and-hide beast. Three weeks later, a guest ranch I used to live near was being emptied out after it was sold and the former ranch manager reached out to say they were getting rid of a taxidermy mountain lion they had above the bar and he wanted to give it to me. I had seen this cat more than a decade earlier, dead and frozen in the woods, likely hit by a car, which broke her leg. She happened to be on ranch property and they pulled her out and mounted her. Now I have two of them. When it rains, it pours.
**Eric**
Best gift: In 1983, when I was but a lad of six, my parents gave me a lovely National Geographic book, _The Wonder of Birds_ ,__ and its companion, _Field Guide to Birds of North America_ , both of which had just been published. I don’t know if I had shown any special interest in birds up to that point; maybe my folks just had a feeling. I would go on to spend who knows how many hours poring over both volumes, absorbing as much as I possibly could from each. And I have loved birds with all my heart ever since.
Worst gift(s): Perhaps I should call these the best-worst gifts. Anyway, every year around the holidays my grandmother would decide, for whatever reason, to get rid of certain knickknacks for which she no longer had any use. Rather than take them to a thrift store, though, she would wrap them and give them to my sisters and me after we had opened our more conventional gifts, saying she had just found a special bag from “Santa Claude.” So I have Santa Claude to thank for things like an old eggbeater, a long-handled shoe horn, and a mismatched assortment of cutlery. But I love remembering the look of impish chagrin on my grandmother’s face as she would pass over these treasures.
**Neil**
Spoiler alert: I’m not here to talk about Christmas gifts, or holiday presents, or any of that stuff. My birthday is on April 1, and so what I’m all about is pranks. Gags. You know— _Haha! April Fool’s!_ What I mean to say is that I’ve had a lot of weird gift experiences. And I can tell you that while being born on AFD may seem like light fun, a joke that never gets old, this b-day is not for the faint of heart. I mean, everyone’s always trying to get one over on you. There are presents that aren’t presents, there are parties that aren’t parties. There are parents who aren’t parents. What does this mean? Well, if you’re not FOOL AF, I’m sorry to say you’ll just never know. Here, though, let me share a glimpse into a Fool’s world. Once, my work colleagues—to include LWON’s own Jenny Holland—decided that the best thing they could do for me was to sneak into my office and cover every possible surface with tiny water-filled Dixie cups! This was a great gift! Unfortunately, I was traveling for work at the time, and when I got back most of the cups were empty—their contents had seeped out and soaked into the rug. However! The sodden rug soon began to smell like cat pee, and it stayed that way for months! So this truly was a gift that kept on giving.
While it’s hard to top the Dixie cups, there is one more I’ll share. This is the first April Fool’s Day gag that I can remember, and boy was it good. I was 5 or 6—small, anyway—and filled with b-day expectations. My grandparents came over carrying a huge, and I mean HUGE box, wrapped in paper and tied, I believe, with string. These were Depression-era people, shaped by privations many of us will never know, and they were not inclined to frivolous wasting of cardboard or string or even lightly soiled Kleenexes. You might also think they’d carefully stashed away their senses of humor, too, in old Mason jars or something—but no! They were funny! On that evening I was summoned into the dining room and immediately my eyes fell upon the big box, a thing so cavernous that all three of my brothers and I could’ve fit inside it with room to spare. Immediately I drooled. It was a castle, a vault, a fucking garage-sized container that clearly held the best gift ever. Or multiple best-ever gifts. You know how imagination works—it’s fast. You’re unwrapping things in your mind way before your tiny hands touch paper. My grandparents saw the ravenous look in my eyes and calmly stepped away, like zookeepers after dropping a carcass into a lion’s cage. And I tore into that box like a lion, or maybe a tornado—a lionado—ripping the paper away and busting up the box flaps.
Now here comes the best part. The box was empty! Clean as a looted tomb. There might even have been a sound to go with it—that faint _whoosh_ you hear in ghost towns, or at crossroads at midnight. I think I cried. No, I’m certain I did. Grandma chuckled a little and said, “I guess he’s too young.” Haha! Yes, Grandma! But you know what? It was really the best present she could’ve given an April Fool. I mean, it definitely taught me something. Hardened me. Almost 50 years have passed and _no one_ gets me now—I am not Foolable. Surprise parties? I am already inside the house, waiting. Gag gifts? I laugh at your lame exploding pies or cakes frosted with toothpaste. And boxes? I don’t even open presents on my birthday. Instead, I regift those empty boxes and shaving cream bombs and confetti crackers immediately to my own children.__ And let me tell you, no one ever expects that shit. Especially not the kids. https://lastwordonnothing.com/2025/12/24/the-gifts-that-keep-on-giving/
