too right I am, inlaw xmas present horror!

[chibi]

Grrrrrr....Every year I dread Christmas with the inlaws because of the crazy amount of crap the give us. I have had to put half their presents in a closet as there is no room for them anywhere else.

The presents are excessive, ill-conceived and for the most part, unwanted. Amongst other things, one of the presents for my 6 month old was a hot water bottle .

What the HELL am I meant to do with stuff like that? Or where do we put the 15 pairs of underwear/socks that my dh recieves twice a year (birthdays too natch). What on Earth do they think he does to socks + underwear to get through them so quickly?

I am now looking at a pile of gifts that go halfway up the tree, with a pile in the closet besides. It just looks obscene.

I end up giving most of it away and then I feel guilty. Yes, they love to give, yes they mean well, yes I am a big fricking grinch but I don't care. These presents don't feel given so much as inflicted.

Give the socks etc to a nursing home - the one with the cheapest rooms per week in your area will be the one whose residents will really apprieciate socks. Ditto hot water bottles etc.

Brilliant idea, Colditz.

Chibi, your ILs may be well intentioned but they are also very, very daft, bless them. Can you not leave copies of the sort of catalogues you like around - Boden/White Company/Argos/whatever? (Although Argos may give them a lot of scope for terrible presents...)

pass them on as presents
or give to charity
or do a carboot sale
or, recycle as gifts back to them

My MIL volunteers at a homeless shelter and she says they are ALWAYS in need of socks. And I reckon hot water bottles would go down well too!

But maybe you should just TELL THEM?!!

thats excellent idea! better still ask in laws too!

oh I know where you are coming from, dp gets 5 nylon-y ("cotton-rich"? Aye right) shirts every christmas, birthday, and any excuse in between from his mother (his brother's wedding was the last one ).

The thing is, and this will sound awful, but dp does actually have a fairly high profile job and actually, he CAN'T really wear shiny purple shirts to work. He just can't. So they lurk in our drawers, and since we seem to be unable to stop having kids drawer space is increasingly at a premium. The same amount of money spent on decent quality shirts would be really helpful, but an endless parade of crap shirts is just not.

I forced him to do a clear out last week, at some temporary cost to the relationship-these bloody things have sentimental value for him. He had about 70 of the things, ffs, mainly still packaged.

What REALLY gets me is that she expects to see them worn, and has been known to go through our drawers to check that they have been unwrapped, washed, and ironed (she was bitterly disapointed, I might add).

Ack I should possibly give her a break, but it is SO SO annoying...

Why don't you just say 'ohh if you are wondering what to get me or DH we'd really like x or Y'?

Some people have no imagination and find present buying difficult.

I will do all these things. I already do, I couldn't chuck the stuff out without convulsing with guilt. Gently hinting what we might like is pointless as they don't listen or mishear it. Gently hinting that they might give less is also pointless.

They do mean well so I can't quite say for FECK'S sake will you please stop buying so much crap as I dearly long to do, it would be hurtful.

Dear god I am a thankless bitch.

My inlaws are the same. Pyjamas every Christmas for their three boys (age 32, 36 and 38 - all of whom sleep naked and have done for years (according to DH, I don't know that personally)). They basically fill a large sack for each son (and one lucky daughter in law ), and seem to buy the most useless crap they can find. I took a whole load down to the charity shops when we moved house recently, but really it is such a waste. I know it sounds ungrateful but they don't seem to think at all about what we might actually want or need.

you don't have to chuck it, wheel it round to the charity shop after xmas.

what do they get YOU? I am always a bit as to whether MIL's obsessive clothes buying for dp is actually a territorial thing.

my MIL is the same. every year we get a pile of crap.

once DH, a business man who has to dress to impress got.... beer bottle cufflinks that looked like they came from a barbie and ken dinner party set and glued onto 1 carat gold links, WTF was she thinking when she saw those.
i got a jumper 4 sizes too big, pink, ribbons and looked like a blind monkey had knitted it.
plus piles of other useless crap, a USB coffee warmer, pyjamas in a bag 4 sizes too big it goes on and on.

everything goes to the charity shop and i don't feel an ounce of guilt because we tell her exactly what we would like and its never expensive, she ignores it and and decides to go to CrapLand and waste her money.

I have always struggled to explain to people why we didn't like our Grandmother giving us presents. They didn't understand. It wasn't that she was desperate to please us. It was that she loved shopping. We were given things we didn't want, said with increasing bluntness that we didn't want, (though always politely) and were just not about us at all, but about her compulsive shopping.
It always seemed so surreal especially as she hated our mum so visits were always filled with tension and angst anyway, then piles and piles of stuff we didn't want as well, it was, well, so out of place. The presents meant nothing. They were just 'things'.

Charity shop/PTFA fete supplies, just a couple of ideas!

Recent gifts from ILs to DC...
VHS tapes (I keep saying we don't have a VCR) 2nd hand broken toys

• new in packaging toys that are so cheaply made they break within 5 minutes of play

You can't even recycle stuff like that to a charity shop. Frankly, I'd rather have pants and socks!!

This is it exactly, it is all random crap. If I told you to get down to a market and buy every 3rd thing your eye happened to fix on, you would have a pretty good approximation of our yearly haul. Those gifts which are not inappropriate are merely excessive, i.e. 6 mahoosive bottles of knockoff (Move or Love or Wave or Shove rather than Dove) bodywash each. We both shower daily but I have yet to get through them in a year.

It bugs me because it is so friggin wasteful, we may as well have burnt the money, at least we could have enjoyed the heat and the pretty flames.

anything you can use, use it. the rest of the stuff divide between returning it to the shop, eBay and charity shop.

A good opportunity for "losing" stuff is a house move if you are moving anytime soon.

My aunt buys like that for my children. SHe buys "bargains" throught the year. Last xmas ds (just turned 2) got a pair of skiing salopets (sp) for sged 6-7 and we have never been skiing (and doubt we ever will).

pmsl @ frootloop's post

feel better?

tee hee, I had a peep at the presents my IL's left and it looks like my one dd will have a third pushchair as well as sooooo much other rubbish, all cheap, nasty plastic too. Feels really ungrateful but would be infinitely more preferable if we could just club together and get one really nice thing. it would be so much less hassle.

what would happen if you really tried to draw a line under it? (perhaps at least for adults - kids might be pushing it!) what would they say if you threw an oxfam Unwrapped catalogue at them and said, very clearly: "we've been thinking long and hard about our luxury lives and have decided that we can't accept presents anymore. If you'd like to get us something we've got our eyes on the goat on page 54"

tell them you've got religion. the type that frowns on gifts. or tell then you don;t "do" christmas any more - you're off to Somerset to hug trees instead.

They will not be told! It is like being in the path of some crappy gift-strewing-juggernaut that Will Not Be Stopped. All I can do is get rid of the gifts as best as I can and have a good old bitch about it on MN.

sounds like they're doing it to spite you am sure mine are

give them pegs and tea towels for their pressies and any other rubbish you can get rid of .. you need to up the anti

It has come to dawn on me that my MIL probably regards my tasteful gifts of posh soap and the like with the same distaste I feel for her choices for us (and I was given a hot water bottle for ds2 last year, before he was even born!).

I like hatwoman's suggestion, but can't imagine it would go down very well.

chubbystuckforafestivename:

no, its bought up memories of other wasteful, useless crap

MIL has done it again this year. we asked for a joint present of some vouchers towards a printer we desperatly need, and we thought this had gone in to her head this time, but nooooooo. dh phones mil one night and i hear him say "what about the vouchers for a printer?" so i just know she has been on another spree to crapland again.

i think other posters are right in saying its a shopping addiction rather than putting any real thought into presents.

crap presents don't bother me much but it really bugs DH that his mother knows so little about him that she cant even get 1 present he likes. another crap present for dh from mil, peter kays biography dh doesnt read books, and he has no idea who peter kay is so is hardly likely to read his biography, another thoughtless waste of her money that went to charity.