It’s December, and you know what that means: it’s time to buy things. Hopefully, for the most part we’re buying things for people we want to give presents to: loved ones, children, friends. Some of these people are easy to buy for (I valiantly resisted the temptation to give my nephews a stuffed pug dog that makes fart noises. They would love this. My brother might stop speaking to me) and some are very hard, but if your goal is to make the other person happy, there are a gazillion other guides full of gift ideas — that is not what we’re here for today. And you know that! That’s why you’re here! Because sometimes, etiquette or family dynamics or office politics demands that you buy a gift for someone you absolutely cannot stand, and I am ready to help you express your dislike with all the tact of Joe Biden writing an epitaph for Henry Kissinger.

Important disclaimers: I don’t buy presents for anyone I don’t like, so if I give you a terrible gift, that’s because it was a swing and a miss, not because I was trying to be passive-aggressive. I don’t scrutinize gifts I receive critically, so if you’re shopping for me, don’t worry about that. And finally, in the interests of official full disclosure, I have an Amazon Associates ID set up, so if you actually buy any of the Amazon items for someone using my links, I get a kickback.

ON TO THE HORRORS.

Horrifying Housewares

Back in the summer, I wandered into a Goodwill store and walked around through the housewares aisles looking at the various gently-used items that people found so useless they wound up donating them to Goodwill, thinking about what this said about what kinds of things people really don’t want. There were a whole lot of decorative shelf clocks:

The fact is, most people these days, if they want to know what time it is, look at their phone. I’m an oddball because I still wear a wrist watch. Shelf clocks don’t exist for people to look at; shelf clocks exist to be a chore every year when we spring forward or fall back. Alas, if you go buy a clock from Goodwill, it won’t come with the box that makes it look new. I went looking for an inexpensive clock suitable for gifting and discovered that you can buy a melting clock that looks like the clocks in that Dali painting, The Persistence of Memory. As a bonus, this clock is extremely difficult to read. Even better: there’s also a melting clock that looks like the clocks in the Dali painting except it has Roman numerals on it so it’s both harder to read, and inaccurate in a way that will definitely irritate any serious Dali fan you buy this gift for.

Possibly my other favorite decorative item this year is this heart-shaped vase, where by favorite I mean “the stuff of nightmares” and by “heart-shaped” I mean “shaped like an actual human heart, you know, with the veins and arteries forming little tubes into which you stick the flowers.”

Let’s just go through some highlights about this object. First of all, it’s got the problem a lot of vases have, which is that it rests on a narrow point and if you use it for flowers and have a cat, it’s going to get tipped over in about five minutes. Second, what most of us do with vases — well, what I do with vases — is that we take a bouquet, and we stick it in the vase with water to keep the bouquet alive longer. We do not wish to carefully thread a bunch of individual carnations or roses into a bunch of separate little tubes. Third, it looks like a human organ. (Don’t get me wrong: I do recognize that this is definitely a GOOD gift for someone out there. Provided that they don’t have cats who like to knock stuff over.)

Let’s Unnecessarily Gussy Up Your Car

I don’t know how I stumbled into this corner of Amazon but they sell some hilariously over-the-top car accessories. Lots of cars have a button now to start them and you can gussy up the Start button by making it look like a red-eyed glitter leopard. (This is an especially terrible gift to anyone who still starts their car with an actual key.) You can also buy decorative vent clips (you can add air freshener to them, apparently) that look like little skeletons doing the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” poses. There’s a coin sorter that would probably have been super helpful back in the era when you paid your tolls in coins and now just suggests that you should be sorting all your coins instead of leaving them to rattle around your car’s ashtray. And finally: a hoodie for your gear shift, so it doesn’t get cold.

Candles!

So I’ll just note: I don’t burn scented candles. Most scented things give me a headache. I have also smelled the results of a Blueberry Pie Yankee Candle being burned to inadequately cover up some really unpleasant smells and this did not leave me with a positive association with Yankee Candles. Anyway, a few times I have been gifted a scented candle, and I said thank you and then re-gifted it to someone who I thought might actually enjoy it. I’m mentioning this just as a heads up — I suspect that a lot of people see scented candles as an appropriately generic gift that you can just re-gift without a lot of thought, and that could wind up being unfortunate if you buy one of these amazing artisan-made prank candles available from EarthsEssenceNC on Etsy. The top 1/4 smells like something nice (you can pick from a variety of scents); the bottom 3/4 smells like, let me look up the options: baby diaper, bad breath, canned tuna, farts, garlic, gunpowder, gym socks, or motor oil.

There’s also a candle that is truly a perfect gift if you are not Minnesotan but have an annoying coworker who’s, say, very loud about their Minnesota Vikings fannishness. There’s a Minnesotan candle seller that makes a Lutefisk scent. (Reviewer: “I was not prepared for this candle, it’s absolutely noxious. I’m very impressed!”) If you aren’t Minnesotan, you can plausibly claim that all you know about lutefisk is that it’s a Minnesotan thing that Minnesotan people are into and so this gift made you think of him because it seemed very Minnesotan, just like his football team. Lutefisk, well, it’s sort of a fish Jello eaten by an ever-decreasing number of Minnesotans in November and December at church dinners. (Here’s an outstanding story from MPR News that explains the tradition. I’ll note that this piece is much, much funnier as an audio piece than a written one.)

Prank candles are probably ideal gifts for officemates you can’t stand because most offices are not going to let you light the candle at the office, so there’s very little risk you’ll have to smell it.

You Need a Hobby and also should spend more time in the kitchen

There’s this genuinely excellent book called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter in which the author goes through a long list of things that she tried making (with recipes) and then assesses whether they were worth it. On the butter, she notes that she tried making butter and it was delicious. But then she bought some unsalted butter from the store, let it soften up, and paid attention while she was eating it, and the fundamental thing is, butter is delicious. And cream is more expensive than butter. I’ll also note that if someone wants to make butter, you can do it with a hand mixer (or a stand mixer, if you’ve got one), you basically just make whipped cream and keep going.

But maybe your cousin who shares tradwife memes would like to get her Laura Ingalls on? You could give her an actual literal hand-cranked butter churn and she could find out for herself just how utterly tedious it is to make butter by hand (and then have an extremely specialized kitchen item to stick on a shelf and feel guilty about.) For a less expensive “you fantasize about living like Laura Ingalls Wilder: let me help you out!” gift, you could give her this hand-cranked coffee grinder so that she can hand-grind the wheat while the blizzard rages outside, or else spend ten to fifteen minutes hand-grinding coffee beans for one 12-cup pot.

There are, in fact, a lot of things you can make from scratch, and some of them are great, if you want to spend a lot of time rolling out pasta dough, for instance. I received a pasta maker as a gift because I requested one. I have used it … hmm. Twice in twenty-five years? I think? Anyway, this pasta-maker is cheap and if I’ve used mine about once per decade after requesting it, you can pretty much guarantee it’ll just be a shelf space hog for someone who didn’t request it.

Here is a yogurt maker that produces a large vat of yogurt. Let me tell you the story of my mother’s yogurt maker. It was the 1980s, and like many 1980s-era children I liked my yogurt pre-sweetened and either fully flavored or with fruit on the bottom that I could stir in. My mother assured me that plain yogurt with jam stirred in was just like Dannon’s. I assure you that this was not remotely the case. I remember my mother’s yogurt maker taking up cabinet space for many years after she gave up and just bought me Dannon. Most people who eat yogurt want to eat something with a veneer of healthfulness but all the sugar of ice cream: wholesome unsweetened plain yogurt produced by the gallon is not actually what they’re looking for. They’d probably rather not admit that, though. Even to themselves.

Other things that most people are happy to buy from the store but you could give them equipment for making: cheese (this kit is just for mozzarella and ricotta), tofu (soybeans not included), plant milk (soybeans not included), peanut butter (as a side note, this machine apparently does not work at all), and sliced bread (that is a very fancy precise slicer, to be clear — they’ll still have to bake the bread). If all those seem like something your recipient might actually want, there’s also this sourdough starter kit so they can feel all nostalgic about the early pandemic.

A Miscellaneous Collection of Pointless Stuff

I usually have a section for terrible (bulky, overspecialized, dysfunctional) kitchen gadgetry but that section kind of got taken over by the Kitchen Hobby Stuff this year. But I really want to share some of these notably pointless items I found:

• Do you know someone who would like to make tiny, seriously so tiny sandwiches over an open fire or maybe by holding the sandwich maker directly over a gas flame? No? Have I got a gadget for you! From the reviews: “Could only fit half a hot dog inside it.”
  
• Possibly someone you know could use a specialized pickle fork with a fork holder you stick (with adhesive) to the side of the jar of pickles. It comes with three snaps you stick the fork holder to, after which I think you’re supposed to throw it away and buy a new set, I’m not sure.
  
• Or how about a wind-up blender shaped like an outdoor motor that’s only big enough to stir stuff like coffee. Also, based on the reviews, it may not actually even work on coffee.
  
• Also! This isn’t a kitchen item but was passed along by a friend specifically for this guide. A “keepsake charm” in a cute little box with a poorly written poem on it. Julia commented: “I feel like this is a gift for someone you are obligated to get something for, who is maybe in the habit of asking for money. Look at the message on the front of the box! Kitty doesn’t care if you are rich or poor. Stay poor! Kitty won’t mind! I can’t tell if it’s better for someone who loves or hates cats. I can see arguments in either direction.”

Cursed Clothing

Do you recall the memeified Three Wolf Moon t-shirt of years past? (OK, wow, probably plenty of you do not recall this. You could be a full-on grownup person and have been in preschool when that meme hit. That might actually make this gift funnier.) Anyway, here is a Three Possum Moon t-shirt.

What I particularly love about this shirt is the dramatic flailing the possums are doing; they look like they’re singing O Fortuna.

Or! Perhaps you know someone who’s got a dress code that requires a collared shirt; good news, cursed shirts are now available with buttons and collars. That one’s also available in “sloth riding a t-rex with laser eyes.”

I went looking for dresses in similarly cursed prints but you know, most of the dresses I found made me think, “I would wear that, if I wore dresses and would look good in this cut, it’s kinda cool,” which may actually just say bad things about my personal taste. I did, however, find this tube top, which looks like a giant bow tie directly over the boob area.

Books Are Always a Good Gift

Books make amazing gifts, all the more so when they’re hand-picked to match the recipient’s interests (or, you know, to do the opposite).

I had a book come out this year! Liberty’s Daughter, in which a girl growing up on a seastead is hired by someone with no money to investigate the disappearance of that woman’s sister. The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading). If you’d like a signed copy, you can order one from either Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven.

Some other books I really enjoyed this year that might either hit the spot or annoy the hell out of people on your gift list:

The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan, a fantasy novel set in Inquisition-era Spain. Excellent gift for Jewish people, fantasy readers, and anyone who’s down with assuming that the Spanish Inquisition is the bad guys. Potentially upsetting gift for tradcaths.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs, a fantasy novel set in the present day. Another excellent book for Jewish fantasy readers. A good passive-aggressive gift to a parent, or a person who played a parental role, who used their position in your life to make profoundly unreasonable demands of you.

You could pair it with Just Do This One Thing For Me by Laura Zimmermann, which is also about parents making unreasonable demands on their kids, although the mother here is feckless rather than scheming. This is a YA novel and a good gift for fans of Dicey’s Song and other “teenagers left on their own” books, although I found the ending of this one particularly satisfying. The biggest villain in the book is a guidance counselor so if anyone you can’t stand works as a high school guidance counselor, you could just note that you heard that this book has a guidance counselor as an important character.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, a science fiction novel about people surviving an apocalypse, set on a remote tribal reservation in Northern Ontario. If you know any white dude gun-collecting survivalists, they’ll absolutely love this book right up until they realize they’re the bad guy.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is a ghost story set in a Minneapolis bookstore in 2020. (It actually starts in late 2019.) This would be a really good gift to anyone from Minneapolis, and a really bad gift to any of the suburbanites who send indignant letters to the Star Tribune about how very unsafe they feel when they drive through Minneapolis in their speeding SUV. Also an ideal (truly ideal) passive-aggressive gift to any white person who has ever claimed that their great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

I am delighted to share with you that the Cincinnati Zoo offers an “adopt your favorite animal” option where you just fill in whatever it is in their collection you wish to symbolically adopt, and they have an extensive collection of insects, all of which you can find listed and described in their “World of the Insect” exhibit section! Options include but are not limited to the Giant African Millipede (“its body is lined with many repugnatory defense glands. When the millipede is disturbed, these glands secrete a foul smelling and tasting liquid”); the Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (“sometimes cause serious damage to citrus and vegetable crops”); the Zebra Bug (“this handsomely marked insect is actually a species of cockroach”); the Bat Cave Cockroach (“This roach dominates a populous bat cave on a large tropical island. Countless roaches cover the cave’s walls and floor, and feed mostly on fresh bat guano”); and the Thorny Devil (“When disturbed, the males painfully clamp down with the especially large spines on their powerful hind legs and release a skunk-like odor”). You can also symbolically adopt a kangaroo (will fight anything that moves), a cockatoo (extremely loud), or a komodo dragon (false advertising: neither breaths fire nor flies).

I feel like the true ideal gift for a Republican relative this year would be a symbolic adoption of a wild orca, given the whole “sink the yachts” campaign some orcas have been engaging in. The Icelandic nonprofit Orca Guardians does non-invasive research on orcas and will allow you to symbolically adopt a specific individual orca for €30. Everything in the package arrives by e-mail. You could pair it with an inexpensive orca tree ornament if you also want something tangible.

I will also note that while MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders) does not offer a cutesy gift catalog they do allow for “tribute gifts” with an e-card. Usually my favorite international charity is IMC Worldwide (in part because they’re very good about not spending all the money I donated bugging me for more money) but this year I’m going to point people to MSF.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

2010: Beyond Fruitcake: Gifts for People You Hate
2011: Gifts that say, “I had to get you a gift. So look, a gift!”
2012: Holiday shopping for people you hate
2013: Gift Shopping for People You Hate: the Passive-Aggressive Shopping Guide
Gifts for People You Hate 2014: The Almost-Generic Edition
Whimsical Gifts (for People You Hate) 2015
Gifts for People You Hate 2016 (the fuck everything edition)
Gifts for People You Hate, 2017
Gifts for People You Hate, 2018
Gifts for People You Hate, 2019
Gifts for People You Hate, 2020: Pandemic Procrastination Edition
Gifts for People You Hate 2021: Supply Chain Mayhem
Gifts for people you hate, 2022