Post #455968 by Dr. Zarkov on Sun, May 24, 2009 7:02 PM

I've gotten lots of dodgy looking Tiki gifts over the years. I can't complain too much, though. It's nice that someone was thinking of me, and let's face it, it may be a bit much to expect someone to distinguish between swank, retro kitsch and contemporary, bad taste kitsch. Like some of the other folks have said, I try to find some unobtrusive place to put them. One solution is that when I invite people for a birthday smash like the one we held last March (my wife surprised me with a whole, roasted 50-pound pig!), I say on the invite, "No gifts, please."

As for one man's trash being another man's treasure, at my last place of employment we had a round robin gift exchange each year at our Christmas party. We were given numbered tickets, and if it was your turn you could take something an earlier person had opened or choose a gift from the pile of wrapped presents, which made for fun because people would see a nice gift like a bottle of booze taken away and then be forced to choose and open what could turn out to be a perfectly awful present. One year a younger man who went before me opened a package containing two hula girl candles, and moaned that no one would ever take them away from him. I was up next and guess what happened?