Gifts for People You Hate 2025: Boycott Friendly Edition

Posted on December 11, 2025 by naomikritzer

Once again, I started working on this before Thanksgiving and once again it’s now well into December and I still haven’t gotten this up. Look, it’s been a busy couple of weeks that included, among other things, proofs for Obstetrix that I had to review. A special election got called. I needed to go see Wicked.

But also, the gift guide this year was a little bit extra challenging. Because most years, it is made up heavily of stuff on Amazon for a couple of reasons:

Amazon’s URLs are mostly pretty reliable. I just went and looked at my 2019 gift guide and while lots of the items I linked to are “currently unavailable,” the link still pulls up the item and the photo so you can see what it looked like. Since most people come just to gawk at the hilariously weird stuff, it’s good to know that the links won’t break.
(This is actually pretty key) I don’t have to worry that I will hurt the feelings of some human artist by saying “give THIS to someone you dislike!” and I worry about that a lot when linking to things on, say, Etsy.
I have an Amazon Affiliate store which means I can set the links such that if people buy the stuff I link to, I get a little bit of money.

But I know quite a lot of people this year who are boycotting Amazon (and Target and a bunch of other big stores). This created sort of a quandary. After a bunch of waffling I decided that the Amazon links were unavoidable, but I also made an effort to find a bunch of non-Amazon options. To the Etsy sellers who find their way back here: I swear I’m not insulting your creations. I’m just saying that the sort of jerks who would deserve passive-aggressive gifts from my readers would almost certainly not appreciate your work properly.

To be clear: I am always in favor of just not buying presents for awful people. But I am also in favor of self-care, and sometimes self-care means making the gesture that will let you avoid the drama. The thing about gifts is that most of the bad gifts that are given are not bought out of passive-aggressive malice but out of clueless good will, and this provides a lot of camouflage for anyone who gifts their brother-in-law a short sleeved button-down shirt with a picture of a raccoon carrying a chain saw and riding an alligator.

The usual caveats apply:

If I have ever given you a terrible gift, I am very sorry and I promise it wasn’t because I hate you. (I don’t give gifts to anyone I don’t sincerely like and care about.)
If you have ever given me a gift, I did not scrutinize it for signs that you hated me. I assume the best about people who give me presents. Actually I generally assume the best about anyone I’m on regular interaction terms with and I sail through life these days assuming that people like me and think I’m cool (this was not always true, but hey, being over 50 comes with certain benefits). If you hate me, I probably don’t even know it.

On to the horrors!

Condiments and/or Ingredients

CNN this year ran a hilariously off-base guide to Hanukkah gifts. Among the fuckups: an ornament (yes, some families do a Hanukkah Bush but you should never assume people do) and also extra-virgin olive oil with the description, “they can even use it to fry latkes during the holiday” (no one deep fries latkes in EVOO, you weirdos). There’s also a “latkes and lights” scented candle but it turns out it’s not actually latke-scented. (A latke-scented candle would make you mad that you didn’t have any latkes, which would be kind of perfect, but alas.)

Anyway, they also had a hot sauce set and I thought, “oh, this would be an outstanding bad gift to anyone who thinks ketchup is too spicy, i.e. an awful lot of Minnesotans, but I bet I can find something cheaper,” and voila, $10 and it comes in a cute gifting box. I was pondering extra virgin olive oil as a gift and trying to find some that would telegraph “this is too fancy to ever actually use; better leave it on the shelf forever until you cook something worthy of this olive oil” and found this specialty website with an “olive oil tasting kit.” (This is definitely a good gift for some people, a bad gift for others — use your judgement.)

Penzey’s is an assertively left-wing company that sells very nice, high quality spices. Most of their spices would actually be a good gift, but they carry a sufficiently complete array that you can definitely assemble a bad gift from their lineup. Get one of the DIY gift boxes and then fill it with the following: whole caraway seeds (useful mainly to people who bake their own rye bread), whole celery seeds (I use a little sprinkling of celery seeds in my refrigerator pickles in the summer but I do not go through them fast), cilantro (cilantro is better fresh, sorry Penzey’s!), whole coriander (they’ll have to figure out how to grind it), cream of tartar (gets used in tiny quantities to make meringue, they’ll have it forever), corned beef spices (almost no one corns their own beef), anise seeds (another rarely-used spice for most people), and then maybe throw in a cinnamon because your recipient will use that, will think “oh wow, this is really good,” and feel like they have to hold onto to the other spices because they’re probably just as good.

Horrifying Home Decor

I forget who initially linked to this object on Bluesky, but made the rounds pretty thoroughly over there:

A pillow that appears to have embroidery (it's not embroidery, it's printed) depicting a screaming goat with bulging round eyes. The goat's mouth is wide open and you can see its tongue.

Honest to god this is probably my favorite item this year. For reasons that truly baffle me, it is available on Shein, and it’s available on Temu, but it doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon or any other domestic retailer. Before you order, you should know a couple of important things: (1) It looks like an embroidered pillow, but it is not. That is a 100% 2-dimensional screen printed object. (2) Also it’s just a pillowcase, you have to supply your own throw pillow. On the plus side it’s also extremely cheap. If that link takes you to an unavailable version, just search “screaming goat pillow” on Shein or Temu and another one will probably pop right up.

Back in November when I started working on this, I had been reading about some godawful White House redecorating project and I started looking up ugly gold stuff on Amazon. I found this thing that looks like a metallic Koosh ball, a gold statue of a balloon dog, the lower half of someone’s face that is also a vase, and the head of a grumpy rabbit with a walrus moustache and a monocle.

But honestly, this is where Etsy really shines. A lot of Etsy sellers have 3D printed stuff on offer, and quite a bit of it is in the category “great for the right person; horrifying for your least-favorite aunt.”

First up, the 2025-appropriate Zen Gardens. You’re familiar with “Zen Garden” desk accessories, right? Here’s an example. The theory is that you keep it on your desk and you move stuff around and rake out the sand and it’s soothing and meditative and looks better on your desk than the pile of papers you currently have there.

The 2025 version looks like this:

Here is a Dumpster Fire Zen Garden that features both possums and raccoons (and a flaming dumpster.) Here is a Dumpster Fire Zen Garden with just raccoons, but it also includes a pen organizer.

This Etsy seller sells portrait suncatchers. They’re custom items, which means you can send over whatever image you’d like immortalized. Obviously in theory you’d send over a lovely photo of the grandkids but you could send your Trumpy brother-in-law an unflattering photo of his hero (this link will take you to an entire Getty gallery of unflattering photos of that fucking guy) or for that matter, a photo of the recipient and their family where everyone looks good except for the recipient. The same seller does a “pet portrait” suncatcher and I’m guessing she’s not fussy if you send an animal picture that’s not your personal pet, like you could do the raccoon that got drunk in the liquor store, or a naked mole rat. (Disclaimer: I have not actually tried to buy a naked mole rat suncatcher; results not guaranteed.)

I specifically looked up vases, because the thing about vases is, so many bouquets arrive in vases that most people wind up with a surplus. Also, there are a lot of vases for sale that are not very practical — test-tube vases, for example. Here’s a test-tube vase mounted in a disembodied hand that looks like Thing from the Addams Family. (The same artist also sells the hand without the vase.) Continuing the “disembodied hands” theme, there’s also this object, which is described as both a planter and a vase, made from a circle of hands. (The thing about a planter is that it needs to have a hole in the bottom. The thing about a vase is that it needs to not have a hole in the bottom. You can’t see the bottom in the photos and my guess is that it’s a vase, but not a vase that would work very well to hold your typical bouquet of flowers.)

There’s also this vase, which looks a little like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but what’s really great is the striking neon green color.

People either like neon green, or they do not like neon green, and a neon green object in a room will immediately attract everyone’s eye. If you like the idea of a very brightly colored vase but want more options than just the neon green, there’s a different vase that comes in a very bright orange but also pink, purple, and multiple shades of green and blue.

“Okay, okay,” I hear you saying, “but what I really want is something shinier, that also looks like the torso of a naked man, but would somehow be appropriate as a gift to that cousin who likes to post ‘THIS IS WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU’ memes.” I have good news:

A 3D printed rendering of the torso of Michaelangelo's David, done in a shiny reddish orange.

That is a surprisingly affordable 3D printed torso of Michelangelo’s David, as a planter, in pretty nearly any color you could imagine.

Please don’t hate me, Etsy sellers!

Frightful Fashion

One of the delightful things about doing this piece as a regular thing is that friends of mine send me links to hilariously awful stuff. I frequently say “oh wow this is amazing” and then lose track of the link, but my friend Rachael sent me a link to these boots last week.

Shaggy (furry) red thigh high boots that look like someone murdered Elmo and took his legs

They come in a whole range of colors, not just Elmo Red. There’s also Cookie Monster blue. (They’re kind of expensive, alas.) Every time I look at them I think, “is this fetishware for people who are really into Muppets,” because I kind of can’t imagine any other reason to wear them. Especially the red ones.

At a more reasonable price point, how about a button-down shirt with a patriotic T-Rex, or a sloth riding a llama standing on a pizza surrounded by burritos, or pirate cats? Or maybe you’d like a sloth riding a dinosaur that’s shooting lasers out its eyes!

(I am noticing a trend of sloths riding other animals, which makes a certain amount of logical sense, actually.)

You Make Coffee Wrong

Most people who drink coffee have a preferred way to make it. I use a coffee maker; I have friends with espresso makers; I have friends who make concentrated cold brew and then dilute it. But if someone is over, oh, 25 or so, and they’re a coffee drinker, they probably have come up with something that works for them.

But also if someone is a coffee drinker you can say “oh, I understand you’re a coffee drinker; I have heard that there is One True Best Way to make coffee” and give them one of the following:

Just make sure it’s whatever they don’t currently use and tell them you know they like coffee, and you’ve heard this (whatever it is) is the best way to make coffee. Instantly annoying gift.

You can also set them up with a milk frother, which is a bulky, one-purpose appliance that will take up space and they’ll probably never use.

And For the Tea Drinkers

A little insulated carafe is a great gift for a tea drinker but not this one, which according to many of the reviews, leaks like crazy. (It looks really cool, though.)

When I was in China in October, I went to a tea house where the tea was served in this little contraption where you poured water in the top, and then it dispensed it out through a little tube if you used the magnet handle to open the spout — it’s hard to explain but you could definitely get one like it for your annoying family member who drinks tea. It’s absolutely in the category of “intrinsically cool, so they won’t want to get rid of it, but actually a lot more complicated to use than a teabag and a kettle, which is what they probably use now.” (There are some great sets that look like dragons and come with eight little tea cups.)

If they do in fact use teabags, you could do the “you’re brewing your tea the wrong way” thing and give them a basket-style tea infuser. However, if they try it, they’ll probably like it.

Hot beverage drinkers of any variety can be given a mug with a little pad that keeps the beverage warm. Or you could give them this one, which will keep it lukewarm.

You Need a Hobby

One of my Bluesky friends is an artist who posts every year the advice not to give children in your life one of those “art kits” that’s got markers, watercolors, brushes, pastels, etc. all in one box, because the quality of the materials tends to be absolute dogshit. This year they specifically suggested St. Louis Art Supply as a good place to buy art supplies (both quality-wise and ethically). One of their visible mending starter kits would be a terrific passive-aggressive gift to someone who buys a lot of fast fashion.

Alternately, this loom kit will allow people to weave long strips of very narrow fabric. Here’s a fun fact about weaving: setting up the loom is by far the most annoying part of the process, and even with good instructions, most people need hands-on help the first time they do it. SLAS also has a Japanese-style indigo tye-dye kit, a spool knitting kit, and a very affordable set of wood-carving knives. (All of these would be perfectly lovely gifts to someone who’s ever expressed interest in fiber arts or wood carving. Use your own best judgment.)

Elsewhere, there’s also this, the “Buddha Board” which I think is basically a high-end Etch-a-Sketch for adults. (You paint with water and the image disappears a few minutes later and you’re supposed to relax and meditate on impermanence.)

The Gift of Experiences

Airbnb now has “Experiences,” activities in your area that you can pay someone to help you do. These experiences are highly variable by location. Minneapolis has an Axe Throwing Experience, a Nordic Spoon Carving class, and a Coffee Tasting. Other cities have Goat Yoga, Llama Yoga (Llamaste!), Beekeeping, Olive Oil Tasting, Giant Sand Castle Building, and of course many, many, many walking tours of various kinds.

Do I know someone who would 100000% enjoy Llama Yoga? YES (and I’m sorry, it’s in Atlanta, unfortunately). Do I also know people who would 1000000% not enjoy Llama Yoga? ALSO YES. Check out your local area and see what’s available.

Books That Send a Covert Message

Books are a terrific gift, but some books function on multiple levels. They can be both a really great read and a really great opportunity for passive-aggression.

Drop Dead Sisters by Amelia Diane Coomes (“It’s apparently sort of a comic thriller”) (that’s about how some men absolutely deserve killing to the point that everyone in the story will help cover it up.)

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (OK, I’m cheating here. This is, in fact, a really terrific gift for the person in your life who just cannot let go of Harry Potter no matter how toxic JK Rowling gets. This is a magical school novel from the POV of one of the teachers, and it’s terrific and interrogates magic, social class, and the experience of adolescence. It’s just so good.) The Grimoire Grammar School Parent-Teacher Association is about the mundane parents of a magical child and is also a book about parenting a child with special needs, and is also a genuinely terrific gift for people who love (or once loved) that series.

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of the Golden Age by Ada Palmer. Ada is a science fiction writer and an academic historian. This is a great read for anyone interested in history, and also a great passive-aggressive gift for anyone who’s ever posted a “this is what they took from you” Tweet about Renaissance art.

You can’t give your friends and loved ones and annoying relatives my forthcoming book Obstetrix yet, because it does not come out until next June, but you can pre-order it for yourself (or, hey, any of those people! “Happy holidays! I bought you a book that’ll arrive in six months.” Who wouldn’t love that?) Pre-orders are particularly powerful for the author in a whole lot of ways: if you order it through your own local independent bookstore, they’re more likely to get it in stock. Lots of pre-orders encourage publishers to print more copies and promote books more heavily.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

The Minnesota Zoo still lets you sponsor any animal they have at the zoo. They still don’t list their cockroaches on the big list of all the animals they have, but they do list guinea pigs (for your favorite antivaxxer) as well as Red River Hogs (known for fluffing out their facial hair to look bigger when threatened) and West African Dwarf Crocodiles (survived from the time of the dinosaurs). ETA: My dad pointed out that at our other zoo (St. Paul’s Como Zoo) you can do a symbolic animal adoption of their sloth.

Also, Habitat for Humanity continues to have a gift catalog. You can symbolically gift someone with a doorbell set if you wish to symbolically call them a ding dong; a box of hammers if you’d like to symbolic compare their understanding of the world to that possessed by such a box; and if you’d like to give them symbolic coal, I actually think furnace filters come pretty close. (Oh, and hard hats! I feel like the “hard headed” symbology there is pretty clear. But still subtle enough to get away with it.)

You can also give people tribute gifts to Doctors Without Borders.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Gifts for People You Hate, 2024

Posted on December 9, 2024 by naomikritzer

Once again, the holidays are upon us, and once again, people are telling me that in this trying time, the one thing I have to offer that they truly need is a hand-picked selection of the absolute worst possible gifts that they can give their brother-in-law. You know which brother-in-law.

If you’d like to push back on the idea that you’re socially obligated to give That Guy a gift, you one hundred percent have my permission to do that, especially given ::waves hands at the world in general:: and you also have permission from the excellent advice columnist Captain Awkward. But sometimes, you hate your brother-in-law but need to stay on good terms with him so you can be around for your sweet, sad-eyed nine-year-old nephew. Or you hate your brother-in-law but want to give the gift of “everyone together without drama” to your lovely mother-in-law who doesn’t have much time left. Or you hate your brother-in-law but just have better things to do with your energy than have a fight, and for $30 you can just not have that fight.

And that’s where I come in! Using my guide, you can carefully select a gift to present with wide-eyed faux sincerity while knowing he’ll take it home and think, “what the hell am I supposed to do with this?” (Bonus points if the nephew thinks it’s awesome.)

A couple of important caveats:

If I have ever given you a terrible gift, it wasn’t because I hate you (I don’t give gifts to anyone I don’t sincerely like and care about), it’s because like everyone else, I sometimes make a terrible call about what would be a good gift. (This is important. Those are the gifts that give deliberate passive-aggressive gifting the necessary camouflage.)
If you have ever given me a gift, I did not scrutinize it for signs that you hated me. I assume the best about people who give me presents. Actually I generally assume the best about anyone I’m on regular interaction terms with and I sail through life these days assuming that people like me and think I’m cool (this was not always true, but hey, being over 50 comes with certain benefits). If you hate me, I probably don’t even know it.
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!

Wildly Impractical Beverage Accessories

Helen Rosner (food writer for The New Yorker) (I love her work, for the record!) released a food-themed gift guide last week that’s, hmm, you know, very much the sort of food-themed gift guide you would expect from The New Yorker. For example, a lot of the ideas are very expensive, although she also suggested these $65 egg cups that are made out of actual somewhat-stale-by-the-time-they-get-to-you bread. (“Jen Monroe is a chef, artist, and food designer whose project, Bad Taste, is committed to exploring new ways of thinking about food and consumption, approaching food as fantasy and as a transportive medium.”) There’s probably someone out there who would be very excited to participate in this art project. They probably live in New York. I’m pretty sure there are also plenty of New Yorkers who would paste on a smile and say “oh! how lovely! They’re … they’re actual bread? Huh! Oh, the artist also did a dinner about the honey bee health crisis? How interesting. Let me just put these somewhere the dog won’t eat them…”

Also on her list: Neiman-Marcus’s lobster decanter. Alas, it is now already sold out. This is an impractical bad gift to buy unless you’re extremely rich, because it costs $450. But it’s kind of amazing in a “what the hell” kind of way so here’s a picture of it:

A blown glass sculpture of a lobster that also can be used as a decanter. It has legs and enormous claws. No one would actually try to serve wine out of this thing, I refuse to believe it.

Also, last I checked, Neiman-Marcus did still have the pufferfish decanter available.

This started me looking at decanters and I found some pretty amazing budget-friendly possibilities. Whiskey decanters, this time (I think the lobster is supposed to be a wine decanter but honestly, unless someone sends me photographic proof, I am going to assume that no one on this planet has ever actually put wine in that thing. Can you imagine trying to serve wine from something like that? Can you imagine washing it after?) Wine decanters serve an actual wine-related purpose, which is to aerate the wine. I was curious if I was correct about the main purpose of a whiskey decanter and Reddit more or less confirmed it: the main purpose of a whiskey decanter is so that your friends do not see that you buy the cheap whiskey. Whiskey decanters are actually not a good way to store whiskey unless you’re drinking it up very quickly because you actually want to protect whiskey from light; the whiskey bottle in a liquor cabinet will work just fine, while a decanter on your buffet, not so much.

So this one is actually kind of cool: it’s a whiskey decanter shaped like a Star Wars Storm Trooper’s head (with two glasses that are molded on the inside so that if you pour in whiskey or some other beverage that isn’t clear, it’ll look like you’re drinking your whiskey out of Storm Trooper heads. Like Ewoks.) However, you have to pour quite a lot of whiskey into the decanter to make it look cool (which means if you’re not drinking it quickly, and want to store it properly, you’ll have to pour it back into the bottle). It’s bulky to store and not dishwasher safe. It’s solidly in the sweet spot of “too nifty to just toss so it’ll take up cabinet space for years.”

There’s also this whiskey decanter, which looks like a gaming controller, and one that looks like a globe. (Also, I swear to god, dozens that look like different kinds of guns, which I decided not to link because guns are gross.) The thing is, again, that you’re supposed to be protecting your whiskey from light; these decanters are all designed to be filled with whiskey and then stored on a shelf to look cool, which is the worst possible way to store whiskey. So FYI, literally any of these is a particularly perfect bad gift to someone who’s actually into whiskey, like nice whiskeys, because people who are into whiskey generally know how it’s supposed to be stored (but as a non-whiskey-expert you can just say you saw it was a whiskey thing, you know they like whiskey, and you’ll look very thoughtful!)

But OK: maybe instead of a container for the liquor you’re interested in some barware (i.e., fancy glasses) that would be annoying to use and impossible to clean. How would you like a set of four tiny stemmed glasses that allow you to sip cocktails out of a bird’s ass? Or! A set of two diminutive martini glasses with a built-in straw to drink from the bottom of the glass? (These would not merely be a pain to clean properly but pretty nearly impossible.) Perhaps you’d like to gift someone a pair of jellyfish wine glasses where the stems of the glasses are the dangling jellyfish tentacles. (These are easier to clean than some because at least you’re not drinking out of the tiny narrow tentacles but I would estimate two uses, max, before at least one of the tentacles just snaps off.) Along similar lines is this set of two wine glasses shaped like roses with cute little leaves coming off the side. So cute! So romantic! So doomed! (And so annoying to clean!) Finally there’s this set of funky shot glasses, which could be a good gift, but if you’re not regularly drinking shots with friends it will quickly land in the “we might use it someday and it’s cool” category of household dust-gatherer.

All of these are alcohol-related gifts; if you’re buying a gift for someone who doesn’t drink (especially someone for whom that’s requiring a lot of effort) I would encourage you to buy off another section of this guide, even if that person is an asshole.

Dreadful Decor

If you’re stuck giving a gift to the sort of guy who uses images of white marble statuary for his Twitter profile, my suggestion is that you buy him a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Sadly, the larger-than-12-inch ones tend to go up in price really quickly (though if you need to buy someone an expensive gift you could get them a 20-inch-tall David lawn ornament for $109.) The main thing either way is that it’s a bjig knickknack that will take up space and gather dust and if the recipient has hang-ups about western art they’ll feel like a bad person if they just straight up get rid of it. Along the same lines you could get someone a set of ten mini statues or a poorly done replica of Winged Victory.

If you can’t bring yourself to give something that’s just truly useless, you could also give someone Marcus Aurelius’s bust as a headphone stand. (OK, this is one of those gifts that can be either a terrible gift or an awesome gift.) Somehow the 27th US President, William Taft, got turned into one of these as well and again: could be terrible, could be awesome, kinda depends on the recipient and their opinion of grumpy walrus mustaches. Or their opinions of tariffs.

For a somewhat broader range of people there’s this disembodied hand that you can install on a wall to hold flowers (or whatever fits in that little tubular vase). Or a giant eye sculpture. No, really, it’s just … an eye. Comes in blue, green, pink, or orange. Especially great if the person you’re gifting it to has an Elf on the Shelf (“now you can have surveillance decor year round!”)

Horrifying Housewares

A long-time reader mentioned this year that she bought a saltshaker for someone with holes too small for the salt to actually come out. I love this as a passive-aggressive gift idea and this sent me down the rabbit hole of novelty salt and pepper shaker sets. One of the weird things about housewares is that certain items, you can choose from this amazing array of novelty versions and others there just aren’t any. There are relatively few novelty sugar bowls but so many novelty salt and pepper shaker sets.

One of my favorites was this knight-and-dragon set. It’s cute, bulky (for salt and pepper shakers), annoying to use (the dragon wings stick out, shaking salt on anything requires maneuvering around those wings), and there’s no obvious coding for which is salt and which is pepper. There are actually a number of sets where there’s no coding at all for which is salt and which is pepper, like this set of identical “male and female” Bigfoot shakers. (The two genders: the one that has two holes in the head, and the one that has three.) Finally, from the department of Licensed Kitsch, you can get a Baby Yoda salt and pepper shaker set where one of the shakers is Baby Yoda and the other is his floating stroller.

Novelty teapots are also abundant, and much like the whiskey decanters for a whiskey fan, you can say “I know how much you like tea!” and you get credit for having considered the person’s interests, but very few tea drinkers have much use for novelty teapots. For one thing, they tend to be impractical for actual use. (Most of them don’t have a steam hole and lots have a badly placed handle and/or don’t pour very well.) This one is a sort of spherical cow with a chicken riding on its back as a handle. Also — you know how the Uncanny Valley is the term for images of humans that just look slightly off — realistic and yet off just enough to be super creepy? Here’s a Schnauzer dog teapot that poses the question, “what if dogs, too, could come from the Uncanny Valley?” And here’s a teapot that looks like a Chihuahua that hates you. As a bonus, you could pair any of these with a gift of tea, but the wrong sort of tea, if your recipient has some well-established preference. For example, some people drink only unflavored black or green tea; you could gift that person fruity tea. Or chamomile in a fancy tin.

And some final odds and ends that I just kind of adored in that “yes! this is horrifying! this would be a hilarious gift!” kind of way (all of these are solidly in the “great gift for some, terrible for others” category):

a French bulldog that is also a bodybuilder, holding little trays for … I don’t know, stuff.
Cat appetizer plates. These are genuinely very cute. The problem is, they’re a weird shape and they don’t stack neatly, which means they’d be incredibly annoying to store.
One of my very favorite items this year, a change dish (or candy dish) that looks like the fossilized jaw of a dragon with a baby dragon perched on the edge. Oh, what the heck, I’ll put in a screen shot of the photo, this thing is AMAZING.

I mean this is like the perfect embodiment of “good gift for the right person, terrible gift for MANY OTHERS.” Even if you think it’s cool, it’s got pointy bits where you’d put your change. Eventually it will collect dust and it will be genuinely annoying to try to clean the dust off. It’s way too nifty to just dispose of, though. The epitome of a modern White Elephant! (Except you don’t have to feed it.)

Catastrophic Clothing

For that guy you know who thinks way too often about the Roman empire or maybe fancies himself a Spartan, how about a t-shirt with realistically printed armor on it? Bonus points if it’s someone who has actually done enough research on armor to know what’s totally wrong here (aside from it being, you know, a t-shirt, not actual armor). (Maybe it’s fine. I know almost nothing about armor. I get strong “Hollywood’s idea of what the Bronze Age looked like” vibes from the picture, though.)

Or perhaps you’d like a Three Wolf Moon variant that uses T-Rexes instead of wolves? (There’s something that looks horribly wrong with those T-Rexes but not in an “AI Generated” way, as far as I can tell.) Alternately someone did an edit with iguanas but apparently couldn’t find photos of them with open mouths, so it’s Three Iguanas Hanging Out Under a Full Moon (with a listing claiming that they’re howling).

Or maybe someone in your life likes patriotic stuff? is into flags? Here is a shirt with a cat, wearing a flag as a cape, riding a unicorn, which is jumping over a shark. Enjoy!

Gift Card Strategies

Someone on Bluesky made the following observation about gift cards: “If you are thinking of taking the easy way out again this year for the hard-to-please people on your Xmas list, you might consider that there is an estimated $27 billion stored on unused gift cards in the U.S.” This is a really excellent point, and the lesson I think we should take from it is that hard-to-please people should be given gift cards not to Starbucks or Amazon, but to small local businesses and arts organizations that could make good use of whatever money you put on it. For example, in Minneapolis & St. Paul, Theater in the Round and the History Theater sell gift cards; so does the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. In the “lovely small local businesses” category, Mischief Toy in St. Paul sells gift cards (and FYI to locals, if you haven’t been there you should check it out, it’s one of the best geeky gift shops I’ve ever seen); so does I Like You, a gift shop that stocks a variety of items from local artists, and Moon Palace Books. Check the local area of your recipient and think small.

Books That Send a Covert Message

Books are amazing gifts! For example, you could give my books as gifts, and whether the recipient reads them or not, I’ve made a sale so it’s a win for me!

Anyway, a couple of targeted recommendations for books I read this year that can be presented innocently but might make your recipient feel deeply uncomfortable as they read. All of these are good books that would be excellent gifts if given sincerely, to be clear:

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Depending on who you’re gifting to, you can say that you heard it was a horror story about a monster OR that it was actually a very sweet romance without any explicit sex. It’s both of those things, and also a very queer story where the real monsters are shitty family members.

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis. Gav wakes up with no memories of who he is or why he’s in an evil wizard’s lair. Turns out he is the evil wizard. This is a delightful setup and an easy sell as “I thought you’d enjoy it” to anyone who likes fantasy novels. However, as Gav tries to figure out why he turned evil the first place, the answer is strongly implied to be, “basically, he was an incel.”

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. “Military SF that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year!” It’s about radicalization (and deradicalization) and how sometimes, you realize that you’re one of the bad guys.

Jane Steele by Lindsay Faye. This is kinda a retelling of Jane Eyre but the Jane in this book deals with the assholes she encounters by murdering them. Would be a fun gift to someone who lives in blissful ignorance of how many people have fantasized about disposing of his body on a pig farm.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

Good news: the Minnesota Zoo still lets you sponsor any animal they have at the zoo. They still don’t list their cockroaches on the big list of all the animals they have, but they do list prairie dogs (cute but carry bubonic plague), Great Horned Owls (owls are associated in US culture with wisdom and intelligence, but are in general some of the dumbest large birds flapping around), pigs, chickens, and sheep.

Also, in my usual hunt to find charities with interesting symbolic gifts, I discovered that Habitat for Humanity has a gift catalog. You can symbolically gift someone with a doorbell set if you wish to symbolically call them a ding dong; a box of hammers if you’d like to symbolic compare their understanding of the world to that possessed by such a box; and if you’d like to give them symbolic coal, I actually think furnace filters come pretty close. (Oh, and hard hats! I feel like the “hard headed” symbology there is pretty clear. But still subtle enough to get away with it.)

You can also give people tribute gifts to Doctors Without Borders.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Gifts for People You Hate, 2023

Posted on December 8, 2023 by naomikritzer

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:

A bunch of decorative small clocks like you'd put on a shelf.

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.”

A bunch of flowers artfully arranged in a vase shaped like an actual human heart, mostly threaded through the veins and arteries.

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.

A black t-shirt with a big full moon and three possums who all appear to be energetically singing opera at the moon. Their mouths are wide and their arms are spread wide.

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:

Gifts for People You Hate, 2022

Posted on December 11, 2022 by naomikritzer

I think I started this on Black Friday (“As I type this, the annual obligatory shopping season has begun” was originally the first sentence) but of course I didn’t actually get it done, so HELLO FROM WELL INTO THE ANNUAL OBLIGATORY SHOPPING SEASON. Sorry about the procrastinating.

If you’re lucky, you don’t need this gift guide, because you’re only shopping for people you actually like, people you sincerely want to make happy with your gift. Stuck for what to get? There are gift idea articles all over the Internet for people looking for good ideas. My friends, that is not what I am providing here today! THIS shopping guide is different. THIS is a guide for all the people who are grudgingly buying an obligatory and hopefully inexpensive gift for someone they can’t stand. Given how popular this guide is, apparently it fills a need! And I live to serve.

I will note: I myself am lucky. I do not buy gifts for anyone I don’t like — although I’ve definitely given bad gifts on occasion out of clueless good intentions. For example, one time back in the late 1990s, I bought a Siberian husky angel ornament for my mother-in-law. (My in-laws trained and raced sled dogs.) My mother-in-law gave that ornament a deeply skeptical look and said “I’ve never met a husky who deserved that halo.” I mean. I tried. I thought, “huskies, oh, she likes husky stuff!” and that sort of well-intended swing-and-miss is sufficiently common that you can use it as camouflage for your own gift-wrapped calculated passive-aggressive gesture. I also do not scrutinize gifts I receive for hints that the person secretly hates me. (In general, I assume that everyone likes me, unless they block me on Twitter, and then I assume that I got caught in a blockchain because who would block me, I am delightful.)

On to the gifts!

Shall We Play A Game?

Giving games can be hazardous if you’re celebrating together. If you give a bad game in-person, especially on a long December day without a lot else going on, you run the risk of being roped in to playing it. So choose wisely.

If you’d like a game that’s fun to play (in case you’re roped in) but with a subtle “there’s a reason I picked this game for you” vibe, you could gift Guillotine (in which various figures from the French Revolution are sent to the guillotine) or Give Me the Brain (in which zombies attempt to fill fast food orders). (Both of these are good games, just to be clear: the passive-aggressiveness potential there is mainly in the titles.)

On the other hand, if you are absolutely sure you are not at any risk of getting stuck playing a round, there’s this “what if Hot Potato, but the potato gives you an electrical shock?” game: Lightning Reaction.

The Opposite of Fun

As a podcast listener, for a while I was constantly hearing ads for an electric toothbrush with the suggestion that an electric toothbrush would be a terrific gift. Electric toothbrushes are in fact the perfect passive-aggressive gift: it suggests that the person’s dental hygiene probably needs work, and let’s face it, tooth brushing is kind of the opposite of fun. (I brush my teeth every day — I feel like I need to be clear about this given the state of Hygiene Discourse on Twitter — and I in fact use an electric toothbrush. I bought it for myself, though, and I’m not going to pretend that it somehow made brushing my teeth fun.) If you do gift someone an electric toothbrush, the one that advertises on podcasts apparently has poor quality control and doesn’t work very well, and this one is cheap and breaks quickly. (Also, the weirder the off-brand, the harder it will be for people to get the replacement brush-heads.)

Anyway, if you want to go for something even less fun than a toothbrush here’s a toothbrush sanitizer, which has the added bonus of giving them a brand new thing to worry about.

Other “for the person who has everything!” completely unfun gadgetry: a sweater de-piller (per reviews, this actually works pretty well), a magnetic wristband that’s supposed to hold screws but doesn’t work, and for people in northern climates, a large, bulky, completely nonfunctional electric windshield scraper. If you want a cheaper dysfunctional windshield scraper here’s a heated one that has a review from someone saying they had better results using a spatula.

Terrible Kitchen Gadgets

I have been cooking for a really long time at this point so let me start with a short discussion of what makes something a good kitchen gadget. A good kitchen gadget needs to make some job easier. Ideally, it should make a frequent job easier. It needs to be comfortable to use and easy to clean. There should be a way to store it conveniently and safely. I’m not unalterably opposed to a cutesy design, but nearly everything I’ve ever tried that was cutesy was also much harder to use, clean, and/or store than the non-cutesy version.

But cutesy kitchen gadgets are, well, cute. And thus absolutely perfect bad gifts because the recipient will feel bad about getting rid of it.

For example, here’s a box grater that’s shaped like an adorable bear. Non-cute box graters have a handle on the top so you can hold down the grater while you’re using it. This one does not have that feature. Alternately, a pizza cutter that’s shaped like a circular saw! This is a little less frustrating to use, but you have to take it completely apart to get it clean and there’s no safe way to store it. (Pizza cutters frequently have that problem, but this one is also shaped in a way that makes it super awkward to put in a drawer.) From the same company that makes the bear grater, here’s a Vampire-shaped garlic press (this doesn’t look like it would actually be that much more annoying than any other garlic press — they’re basically all annoying) and a Ninja-shaped cutting board that holds a knife (so you can’t readily stash it with your other cutting boards).

If you’re Christmas shopping for a cooking enthusiast who’s less than a foot tall, these miniature (yet usably sharp) kitchen knives will be a terrific choice! … they’re cute and completely pointless for everyone else. (I mean, yes, in theory someone could use them as letter openers. No one will actually do that more than once: they will grab something larger and easier to handle.) For an even more useless item, the same people also make a tiny folding knife. I’m not sure how you unfold it but I’m guessing maybe you use the same tool you use to pop out your cell phone’s SIM card, if you can find it.

Books and Book-Related Novelties

Books are, as a general rule, excellent gifts, but they’re much better gifts if you choose them with the person’s interests in mind. For example, Meg Elison’s Number One Fan is a genuinely good gift for anyone who likes thrillers and doesn’t mind some body horror (I read it in two sittings, after tearing myself away at 1 a.m. because I really needed some sleep) but it’s also the perfect gift for your misogynistic brother-in-law who doesn’t need to know anything beyond “it’s like Steven King’s Misery in the era of social media!” H. Clarke’s books (Scapegracers and Scratch Daughters) would both be a genuinely excellent gift for someone who likes queer, witchy YA fantasy about teenage girls and a passive-aggressive gift for anyone who dislikes queerness, witches, or teenage girls. If you know anyone from the “we’ll just all move to Mars with Elon Musk!” school of global warming solutions, Ruthanna Emrys’s Half-Built Garden would be a highly personalized “get it together, bucko” message (but it’s also a good gift for people who are interested in hopeful science fiction and plausible utopias.)

There are also some interesting book-related novelties you could give someone headaches with. Like bookends. The thing about a bookend is, if you’re storing your books on bookcases, a bookend is only useful if you don’t have enough books to fully fill a shelf — which is a situation that most people I know handle by buying more books. A bookend masquerades as something useful, but is only going to get in the way.

You can gift one that looks like two halves of a cute vintage bicycle and according to the reviews, is too light to actually hold up books — so it’s also not useful for the person who’s storing their books on open shelves rather than a bookcase and actually needs an effective bookend to keep them on the shelf. This one incorporates a bud vase, because sure, you definitely want to keep a little test tube of water right next to your books. Here’s a set of oversized elephants that again, according to reviewers, will still slide to the side if you try to use it to hold books up that don’t want to stand on their own. Or maybe you’d like some slightly creepy disembodied hands!

If you truly want something they will have to find a spot for, there’s this one:

A silhouette of Superman appears to be flying and pushing against a stack of books to keep them from falling over. The books are leaning slightly to the side.

….which works its magic using a slanted bookend you slide into a book, and magnets. (The Amazon page has a short video that shows you how it works. Once again, it’s too light to hold up most books, but it’s solidly in the category of “for the right person, actually awesome?” so gift wisely.)

For other not-terribly-functional gifts for readers there are all sorts of elaborate bookmarks, including “looks like jewelry, is not actually long enough to stay in the spot in the book“; “a cute bookworm that is excessively fussy to put in place“; and “looks pretty nifty displayed on a shelf, super annoying as a functional bookmark.” You could also gift them a book light for reading in bed that has to be moved with every page flip and according to reviews gets scratched if you breathe on it.

What You Need is a Hobby!

Part of why it took me so long to write this piece this year is that I got a little hung up on this one. Apparently one path to de-radicalizing family members lost down a rabbit hole of horror that occasionally works is to find them a better hobby. So I started thinking, maybe I should suggest good hobby kits for people? Which turned into a lot of unnecessary pressure because as it happens, I do not know what sort of hobby your aunt might actually find absorbing enough to pursue, and also, “if I just pick the right hobby for my aunt, maybe it will restore her to the person I used to know” is a lot of pressure to pack into a holiday gift. Anyway: hobbies are actually great, but these kits are not.

Gardening! These tools look fairly terrible, a bunch of them are really not useful, and they come in a case. You don’t actually want a case for garden tools; you want a basket or something. The case means you’ll have to clean them carefully after each use just to put them away. Pair this gift with a bunch of seeds that would have to be started indoors to be useful (for example, tomatoes if they live in Minnesota.)
Latch hook! Remember latch hook? If you were a kid in the 1980s you probably remember latch hook. This kit is tiny, so they might actually finish it (unlike 99% of latch hook kits sold in the 1980s) but it also just does not look very good.
Diamond Painting! This is a craft that involves painstakingly sticking down lots of tiny sparkly beads. The people who like it say it’s relaxing. This kit has a very boring picture that doesn’t really showcase the sparkly.
Birdwatching! Here we have a pair of absolutely terrible binoculars. Pair it with a bird identification book for the wrong part of the country. This series is fantastic. (I mean, it’s genuinely fantastic. But it’s also regional, so you could get someone the wrong region. “I didn’t see one for Michigan, so I bought you the one for Minnesota since both states are in the midwest.”)

So Horrifying it’s Arguably Awesome: Clothing

Alas, my friends, I procrastinated on this so much that the sweatshirt on which Jesus is ministering to a bunch of cats in heaven is now not going to arrive in time if anyone orders it.

A hooded sweatshirt with a photorealistic image of a smiling Jesus crouching down and playing with a bunch of kitties.

Fortunately, you can still get a t-shirt of cats doing the Titanic pose as they pop out of a space nebula, “Three Wolf Moon” but with cats (who are howling, I guess?), sweatpants covered in extremely alarmed looking cats, and a sweatshirt with a brightly colored glow-in-the-dark cat peering out of it. Those would all arrive by Christmas.

So Horrifying it’s Arguably Awesome: Home Decorating

To start with, I have for you (or someone who deserves it, for whatever reason) a solar-powered multicolor light up yard peacock. Also a less flashy (it’s not as colorful) but still somehow horrifying solar powered light-up squirrel. Or a very colorful solar-powered rose garden.

This probably happened a while ago and I just failed to notice, but we crossed some threshold with solar power where they can just make things light up that did not used to light up at all. Like wind chimes, available in both light-up hummingbirds and light-up cardinals. (Wind chimes are one of those things a lot of people hate anyway. Random tinkling noises are pleasant to some people, super grating to others.)

For some indoorsy items, here’s a cute little tabletop fountain with a motor that within a month or two will make a grinding noise that drowns out the soothing sound of trickling water. Alternately, remember the joys of “some assembly required” children’s toys? Here’s a lamp that comes as a “puzzle” (but you can plausibly claim it just looked like a lamp on its Amazon page.) Finally, here is a novelty computer mouse that looks like a car. I bet it is a lot more annoying to use than the boring sort of computer mouse.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

I was thinking a few weeks ago about how symbolic animal adoptions tend to focus on cute animals with wholesome reputations and wondered if there were any insect-focused zoos that might offer virtual adoptions of bugs. A google search for “insect zoo” quickly turned up the St. Louis Zoo’s Insectarium. I got all excited, checked out the website – you can, of course, adopt any animal at the zoo – went looking for a list of the insects at the Insectarium and turned up nothing.

No problem, I thought, I will simply send an e-mail!

In retrospect, I think my mistake was in providing context (including a link to last year’s gift guide) rather than just asking for a list, because no one has replied to my e-mail even though I was very very clear that what I wished to do was send them donors. (I mean, to be fair to them: it’s also possible that the person who would normally have replied to my e-mail is out with Long COVID. But I sort of suspect that’s not it.)

Anyway: I’m going to direct you this year to the Minnesota Zoo, which allows you to adopt any animal at the zoo and has hissing cockroaches, although it does not list them on its page of animals. If a cockroach (even a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach) would be just a little bit too on the nose, I’ll note that they also have wolverines (which have cool associations thanks to sports teams and Red Dawn but are in fact stinky and mean); trumpeter swans (loud, decorative assholes); and sea dragons (like their less-badass-sounding cousins the sea horses, the males are the ones who get pregnant). Oh, and fruit bats. I think fruit bats are adorable but mileage definitely varies on that. You can do a virtual adoption of any animal at the zoo.

For years, my suggested fallback charitable option was charitable gifts through Oxfam Unwrapped, which let you give someone crabs, worms, or *cough* manure. Imagine my dismay when I went to check on the links and discovered that the entire Oxfam Unwrapped program has been discontinued.

“Have them give malaria nets,” my kid suggested. “If you give someone a malaria net and say ‘this made me think of you,’ and they weren’t already interested in malaria prevention, there is basically no way to interpret this that isn’t insulting. Are you saying they remind you of mosquitoes? Of malaria? Either one is bad.” A friend suggested the Biogas Stoves from Heifer Project (or shares of them), since that’s symbolically representing coal or possibly suggesting “you are simultaneously full of both hot air, and burning animal feces.” One of my personal favorite charities is the International Medical Corps, which in fact has a gift catalog but most of their gifts are just nice things that people need and don’t have any particular double meaning like “crabs,” alas. (Maybe I should write in and suggest they offer some options like that for next year.)

Have You Considered Giving Someone My Books?

I had a book come out last year — Chaos on CatNet, the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet. I also have a short story collection called Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories, and I had a short story appear this year in an anthology called The Reinvented Heart.

You can usually find signed copies of my books from Dreamhaven Books or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which do mail order. When Amal El-Mohtar tweeted about Catfishing on CatNet she said, “Do you know a queer teen? Are you a queer teen? Are you an adult who misses an internet that felt kinder & purer? Did you love the Hugo-winning short story ‘Cat Pictures Please’? PLEASE do your heart the gift of acquiring & reading this beautiful book.”

So if you want a good gift you could totally give someone a copy of my book. And just from Amal’s description you can probably figure out exactly which of your relatives this would be a bad gift for. I’ll note that there’s nothing on the book jacket that will give away, for example, the scene where the main character and her friends hack an instructional robot to provide accurate sex ed, so if you want to pretend ignorance later, your plausible deniability is covered. You could also buy any or all of these for yourself — if you’ll be spending time this holiday season around highly stressful family members, there’s no escape like a good book. And if supply chain issues have made print copies difficult to find, I am just as happy when people read my books on their e-reader as when they read print copies.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Gifts for People You Hate 2021: Supply Chain Mayhem

Posted on November 15, 2021 by naomikritzer

Welcome, my friends, to my annual guide to passive-aggressive gifting.

In a better world, no one would feel like gift-giving was an unavoidable obligation, and certainly no one would find themselves resentfully shopping for someone they actively dislike, but we’re not in that world yet, and across the globe in December (or November, especially when Hanukkah comes early), people resentfully head to the mall to try to select something acceptable yet inexpensive for their mother-in-law, their neighbor, their obnoxious cousin, or their least-favorite coworker who they unfortunately drew for the office Secret Santa.

And I’m here for you! Once again, I have assembled a selection of inexpensive items that will look like you cared enough to send the very best, while in fact giving people the gift of wasted time, wasted space, frustration, annoyance, etc.

As always, I want to take a moment to emphasize that I don’t buy gifts for anyone I don’t like — if I’ve given you a terrible present, I like you and it was clueless goodwill and not passive-aggression (the very sort of clueless goodwill the rest of you can use as camouflage). I also do not scrutinize gifts I receive for hints that someone secretly dislikes me. (I cheerfully assume that everyone likes me, and occasionally discover that I’m wrong, and then usually forget that the person dislikes me and embarrass us both the next time I see them in public and give them a hearty hello while they’re trying to avoid eye contact.)

Anyway. I’m doing this guide very early this year for two reasons: (1) Hanukkah starts in November (we almost got another Thanksgivukkah) and (2) SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES. As everyone knows, supply chain issues are wreaking havoc everywhere, on all the things, and this is a particular subtle bonus to passive-aggressive gifters as you could buy something completely bizarre, like you could give the person from your office gift exchange a Bob Ross Chia Pet or an Archie McPhee Yodeling Pickle and then shrug and say “you know, supply chain issues!” and they’ll be forced to assume that the shelves at Walgreens were otherwise picked bare and you did the best you could.

(The shelves are not actually going to be bare. There will be tons of stuff, you just won’t be able to find the item you want in your size, which is always true, but it’ll be more true this year. Also, print copies of your friends’ books may be hard to find, so if you haven’t bought all your friends’ books already, get on that or resign yourself to ebooks.)

Let’s talk about some bad gift options, shall we?

What you look like you need is a new hobby!

You know what your sister-in-law needs? Something more productive to do with her time than reading OANN links on Facebook. Maybe she could take up bonsai. Bonsai is a great hobby, but usually when you gift someone a bonsai, you give them a tiny tree that they can mold and trim. This kit gives you seeds. Do you know how long it takes to grow a tiny tree from seeds? It takes years.

Alternately, here is a kit where you make tiny bowls out of embroidery thread. Per reviews, the glue soaks right through the thread so it’s almost impossible to get it off the plastic shell included to form the bowls on. In the event that your recipient gets it to work, the result is a tiny bowl made from embroidery thread, which can’t be used for much of anything useful. So you can give someone both a time waster and a tchotchke.

For a mere $10, you can buy someone a reasonably nice pocket set of watercolors that comes with brushes and a brush holder. Of course, your recipient will need some watercolor paper. You can then buy them 14 sheets of high quality, large sheets of paper, so that they’ll worry endlessly about wasting it. Alternately, you can buy a similarly thin pad of large, cheap paper. (That one telegraphs “for kids!” though — for maximum psychological pain, a tiny high grade quantity of a key consumable is a good way to make a new hobby feel painfully high stakes.)

Or perhaps you can pretend that you think they’ll enjoy a paint-by-numbers technicolor Darth Vader. (There’s a whole range of paint-by-numbers kits, so if Vader is actually up their alley you could instead get them something with more of a Thomas Kinkade vibe.)

Gifts that seem useful, but really aren’t.

If you know someone who likes to think of themselves as a rugged, self-sufficient type, you could give them a survival kit. There are lots of pre-made survival kits with various types of gear; this one is very small, and very cheap. (A cautionary note for anyone thinking about giving it to a person they dislike but would rather not see actually die in an actual emergency: the flashlight comes without batteries.)

Speaking of batteries, apparently some people find it helpful to take them all out of their packaging and carefully load them into this elaborate case. Definitely give this to someone you don’t like who already has a perfectly reasonable battery storage solution.

There are many people who find compasses to be useful. They probably would not actually want to take this large, showy, decorative compass into any situation where a compass might be useful. (It weighs almost 12 ounces! Imagine using it to orienteer your way through the woods!)

Have you ever tried to fix something while holding a flashlight and encountered the “not enough hands” problem? Maybe you think this problem would be solved by building LED flashlights into a pair of fingerless gloves. According to several reviewers, this problem is solved a whole lot better by a head lamp, since that points where you’re looking and your glove flashlight might or might not.

Most people these days get the bulk of their weather forecasting information via a phone app. It can be nice to have an indoor-outdoor thermometer but the dial kind is a lot easier to read than the classic “mercury is rising/falling” style (which are made without mercury, FYI). You can also buy some very attractive barometers, at various price points, one of which seems to basically be a snow globe for grownups. In other words, a gadget that purports to be useful, isn’t particularly, but IS fragile and attractive so they can’t just shove it in a closet: the perfect bad gift, at least for someone who, if they need a weather forecast, is going to look not at their fancy glass barometer but at their phone.

Would your recipient enjoy owning a fitness tracker? I know a lot of people who enjoy fitness trackers but none of them have fitness trackers with an alarm that once you’ve turned it on, you will never be able to shut off or reset, which according to the reviews is a feature of this budget-priced model. It also only works in metric, and despite being mainly a step counter, is incredibly unreliable about counting steps.

(Almost forgot to include this one!) Via the Black Friday Sales, how about a toaster-style hot dog and bun cooker? All the counter space of a large toaster but so much more pointless.

Let’s Gussy Up Your Home Office

Is your gift recipient still working from home? A ring light is a gadget that lights your face so you look better on Zoom calls. There are plenty of inexpensive, reliable models, but this one is significantly cheaper, provides inadequate light, and will break almost immediately.

There are also a ton of desk accessories that could be either horrifying or awesome, it depends a lot on the recipient. For example, this tape dispenser with a monkey that claps cymbals as you pull out tape. (I love how product descriptions for this sort of thing always call a “conversation starter.” Entirely accurate for conversations that begin with, “what the hell is that?”)

“What the hell is that?” “Oh, that’s my tape dispenser with a monkey that claps its cymbals when you pull out tape.”

Alternately, you could get this kind of amazing skull desk organizer. It has two holes in the back of the head for you to put your pens and pencils in, but also the mouth is open and you can use it to store paperclips and stuff like that. If that’s just a little too far over the line, this motorcycle design is less gory but takes up way too much space for a pen holder. This dragon pen holder is also very large. The Knight Pen Holder is less overall bulky but it also holds a single pen.

There are a whole range of unique decorative staplers, including dragon, T-Rex, and carved wooden animals. None of them are particularly well-reviewed as a stapler, but the carved wooden deer looks particularly difficult to use because of how the head gets in the way of your hand, and it looks to me like the staples you’d have to use in that one are the mini kind, which are both harder to find and really useless.

Finally, let’s talk pens. Fountain pens can be really excellent gifts, and FTR, I’ve bought Jinhao fountain pens and despite their low price, they’re nice pens. But some really emphasize form over function, with sculptural decorative bits right where you’d kind of want to hold the pen. They have various sculptural rollerball pens as well as fountain. Oh, here’s another one that’s really neat to look at but has literal dragon spines where you’d be holding it? (If you’re in a situation where two people need to give separate gifts, you could pair the knight pen holder with a fancy, unusable pen!)

Magazines: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A magazine you’re interested in is something you can enjoy all year. A magazine you are not interested in is junk mail that endlessly piles up and makes you feel guilty for not reading it!

Smithsonian magazine costs $12/year, comes with a tote, and supports the Smithsonian Institution. This would be a good gift to people interested in American history and historical research. This would be a terrific gift to people who have loud, angry opinions about “heritage” but mostly seem to have gotten their history education from right-wing Facebook memes. (ETA a quick warning: that subscription comes with auto-renewal! So be careful about that.)

The Nib sells print subscriptions that send out 3 issues per year. It’s a magazine that does comics and cartoons — who doesn’t like that? (You don’t have to tell your recipient that you do know it’s left wing comics and cartoons.)

There are several science fiction and fantasy magazines that still publish in paper. including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ($39/year), Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine ($36/year), and Analog Science Fiction and Fact ($36/year). If you’d prefer to clutter up their inbox, you could gift them a 12-month digital subscription to Uncanny, Magazine for $24, a 12-month digital subscription to Clarkesworld for $36, a 12-month digital subscription to Apex Magazine for $24… Just to be clear, these are only a bad gift for someone who dislikes science fiction and fantasy! If someone likes science fiction and fantasy and you want to give them a bad gift, look for a magazine that publishes something they don’t enjoy reading. For example, for $35 you can gift a year’s subscription to the Kenyon Review, which publishes literary fiction.

Finally, if you’ve got someone in your gift-giving circle who’s fond of the phrase “I’ve done my own research,” for $26/year you could support their research interests with a subscription to Scientific American!

From the Department of Either Nightmarish or Awesome, Could Go Either Way

Would you like to give someone a sweatshirt with a picture of a sloth riding a T-Rex with lasers shooting out of its eyes? Or maybe you’d prefer a housecat riding on the head of a swimming tiger? Or maybe you’re nostalgic for that old “three wolf moon” t-shirt design but you really want four wolves and also for it to be on pants (that one’s particularly great because there’s a wolf nose lined up with the crotch.) You could also get pants on which a cat in a cowboy hat is riding a shark that’s vomiting a rainbow.

This absolutely awesome t-shirt has cats striding across clouds out of some sort of orange whirlwind with a cat in the background that’s maybe supposed to look like a feline version of a wolf howling but instead kind of looks like it’s yakking. And I think this cat is doing “Warrior Pose 2” in a yoga class but I’m not 100% sure.

They’ve really expanded the stuff with this sort of hyperrealistic printing and you could also gift someone a laser-cat apron, a jumpsuit that looks like an astronaut’s space suit, a one-piece adult romper with a space kitten, and socks that looks like horse’s hooves.

All of this is the sort of thing that is perfect for some people, absolutely atrocious for other people — you could potentially gift the exact same t-shirt (or hoodie or apron) to your best friend and your worst enemy, and get the reaction you’re hoping for from both.

Finally, this one isn’t clothing, but is an object that would be delightful to the right person, horrifying to the wrong person: a glowing, color-changing dragon lamp. (They’re marketing it as a night light, but they also claim it’s a dinosaur. Anyway: someone in your life might need this, either because they’ll love it or because they’ll have to pretend to love it.) Llama and Unicorn are also available.

Charitable Gifts

One of my favorite passive-aggressive charitable gift options is to symbolically give someone an animal that offers a subtle negative comment on their looks, hygiene, or personality. This would be easier if more zoos included all their animals as opposed to just the notably cute ones. I did find a useful article that lists the 19 dumbest animals on earth, though, and there’s a decent chance that a zoo near you will have giraffes, flamingos, sloths, ostriches, komodo dragons, or slow lorises available for adoption. Great Horned Owls are also on offer — owls have this great reputation for wisdom but are incredibly dumb, kind of like certain conservative NYT columnists.

The Minnesota Zoo notes you can sponsor any animal at the zoo for $100 and get a certificate and a fun book if they don’t have the appropriate stuffed animal. Mystifyingly, despite having a “name a hissing cockroach after your ex for $10” promotion for Valentine’s Day at least once, they don’t list their hissing cockroaches. (I bet they’d do it for you if you called.) They do list giraffes, flamingos, and sloths, as well as porcupines, pigs, and sheep.

The St. Louis Zoo offers $25 adoptions and will also let you adopt any animal at the zoo (for $35, you get a picture of the animal), and in addition to the usual stuff (everyone has giraffes), they have tarantulas, a wild ass, and cobras.

Branching out from zoos, the Friends of Saguaro National Park will let you symbolically gift someone the adoption of a Saguaro Cactus! ($35, and you get a certificate.) And the Wetlands Institute of New Jersey lets you adopt a horseshoe crab. ($25 and you get a digital certificate and a digital photo of a horseshoe crab. You could always print it out for them.)

For more animal gifts with negative personality implications, Oxfam Unwrapped has sheep, pigs, and chickens, and they still let you give people manure, toilets, and highly-efficient stoves (if you’d like some symbolic coal). You could also suggest that someone is not merely annoying but potentially dangerous by gifting a mosquito net to prevent malaria in that person’s honor.

Have You Considered Giving Someone My Books?

I HAD A BOOK COME OUT THIS YEAR! Chaos on CatNet, the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet. I also have a short story collection called Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories. You can often find signed copies from Dreamhaven Books or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which do mail order (Uncle Hugo’s is currently exclusively doing mail order). When Amal El-Mohtar tweeted about Catfishing on CatNet she said, “Do you know a queer teen? Are you a queer teen? Are you an adult who misses an internet that felt kinder & purer? Did you love the Hugo-winning short story ‘Cat Pictures Please’? PLEASE do your heart the gift of acquiring & reading this beautiful book.”

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Gifts for People You Hate 2020: Pandemic Procrastination Edition

Posted on December 24, 2020 by naomikritzer

I really need to migrate my blog so that I can use wordpress,org instead of wordpress.com and install the plug-in that allows me to ditch the Block Editor. I decided I didn’t want to migrate during election season, and like a lot of tasks, procrastinating on it a little made it feel insurmountable. The other problem is, I really hate using WordPress this way (I’m using a different workaround, posting from the wp-admin page, but this is also really annoying) and that means that stuff I ought to be posting isn’t getting posted either. I have got to figure this out before the next election season starts, but I also have a short story due to an anthology on the 31st. It’s a conundrum.

In the meantime, I did want to bring you a belated Gifts For People You Hate, although I imagine obligatory gift purchases are down this year. The pandemic means you have an ironclad excuse for skipping any family gatherings with people outside your immediate household (and I hope you’re doing so) and workplace Christmas parties are not a thing (I hope). But, this year — should you unexpectedly receive a gift tomorrow from someone you didn’t buy for because you don’t like them — tell them it’s in the mail, you ordered it weeks ago but COVID and DeJoy have screwed up the post office so thoroughly you don’t think they’ll see it until January, and then return to this list for ideas!

As always I should note that I don’t give gifts to people I don’t like. If I gave you a terrible gift, I really thought you’d like it, I swear.

On Brand for 2020 Novelties

Who in 2020 doesn’t want a salt and pepper shaker holder that looks like a skull, with the shakers resting in the eye sockets? Or we could go with a salt-and-pepper shaker holder that features the Grim Reaper. Or for something marginally more subtle, there’s a salt-and-pepper shaker holder that’s got a skull with a raven perched on top. Any of these are the perfect way of saying “stop fucking going to parties, and wear a mask, you fucking asshole,” but with a bow on top.

These are possibly in the “actually awesome” category but when everything under “dumpster fire” on Amazon was kind of boring I checked Etsy, and you can buy a miniature dumpster with a fire that ACTUALLY TURNS ON AND FLICKERS. It’s a pointless novelty that will quickly become dated while reminding people of 2020 and therefore it’s terrible (but it’s also pretty awesome).

I saw (and shared) a meme the other day about how if you eat scrapple, you’ve got no grounds to complain about the ingredients of the covid vaccine, and in honor of this I went looking to see if artisan scrapple existed anywhere that you could buy and have shipped. I don’t know if I’m surprised or not surprised to find out that it does not, in fact, exist anywhere that I could find. I did find a t-shirt proclaiming the wearer’s love for scrapple, though.

From Calamitywear (which usually makes Blue Willow-style dinnerware but with stuff like Godzilla on it), you can get a print suitable for framing commemorating the year 2020. Comes unframed, so the person who gets it will have to frame it in order to display it.

And I don’t know if this is exactly “on brand for 2020” but it’s certainly a weird, pointless novelty: a Pencil Terrarium.

Off Brand for 2020

A cute shoe-polishing kit. Questionable as a gift in a normal year (it’s in the “gifting someone a chore, but fancied up” category), hilariously inappropriate in 2020.

Travel accessories! Packing cubes are actually great but needless to say mine haven’t gotten much use this year. This tech organizer looks like it would be super handy if I were ever going anywhere again. I’ve never found quite the right neck pillow gadget for long flights and maybe this is it? LOLSOB.

Anything makeup-related but a lipstick-brush kit really would feel like it had been dropped from another timeline at the moment, I think.

“Wouldn’t you like a new hobby” Gifts

People have responded in very different ways to the pandemic, and a lot of people have picked up a new hobby. (I now do embroidery while on Zoom calls, because I find it easier to listen if I have something to occupy my hands.) The thing about these hobbies is that they really are only appealing if you chose something that appealed to you — craft supplies for a craft you’re not interested in is just clutter.

And there are so many kits available! Especially on Etsy! Many very reasonably priced. And when you buy them, you’ll be supporting a small business!

Beginning tatting kit. Tatting is a lacemaking craft and the results are very pretty but the process involves math.

DIY lip balm. There are people for whom this would be a fantastic gift. If your recipient is a devoted Carmex user, this will definitely be a bad gift.

Macrame Kit. Macrame is one of those crafts I associate strongly with the earlier part of my childhood — it’s very 70s and not, I think, all that primed for a comeback. You can use macrame to make plant hangers but this kit makes a wall hanging.

Needle Felting Kit. Here’s the thing about needle felting, according to a friend of mine who took it up: it typically involves you accidentally jabbing yourself in the finger with the needle a whole lot of times.

Herb Garden Kit. If this person already gardens, they either already grow herbs indoors or there’s a reason they don’t (like that their cats munch on the basil shoots the second they emerge from the dirt, or knock pots off windows). If they don’t garden, there’s probably a reason for that, too.

Terrarium Kit Without a Container. This actually looks adorable if you already have a container you’re planning to use.

Other ideas: any sort of fancy food or drink if the person is not all that into cooking; any sort of “kit” where the main thing you’re getting is a weirdly impractical presentation (there are “hot chocolate tubes” all over Etsy where you get hot cocoa mix + some candies and flavorings in a corked test tube); any kit for something this person pretty much never uses, whether that’s bath bombs or scented candles or hot sauce.

Memberships and Gift Cards

This is a really hard time for small businesses, and for arts organizations and museums, and one of the ways you can support them is to buy gift cards that can be used after the pandemic. You’re genuinely being thoughtful, here: they’ll be able to use this gift card someday, and you’re investing in that nice thing still being around when the pandemic ends.

You should gift them something from their own community, obviously, but here’s a list of stuff from mine to give you ideas of things to look for.

The Science Museum of Minnesota, which is automatically extending memberships while the museum is closed. I dreamed the other day that I had for some reason gone to the Science Museum, only to find myself wandering around a big space full of people without masks, and I suddenly realized “wait, I’m not wearing a mask, no one’s wearing a mask, what set of decisions brought me here?!?” Anyway: they’re currently closed, but you can still buy a membership, as noted.

The Bakken Museum (“the museum of electricity and life”) is one of my favorite museums in the Twin Cities, and offers memberships for individuals or households.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) sells gift memberships, which is bonus hilarious because the basic admission is always free. (You get some stuff with a membership, like priority access to special exhibits.)

The Guthrie Theater sells gift certificates. Give your recipient a $25 gift certificate, which will be absolutely useless unless they pony up some extra money. (OK, that’s not entirely true; they can use it to stream this year’s Christmas Carol, which is only $10.)

Mixed Blood Theater has memberships. This is a theater in Minneapolis that focuses on “addressing injustice, inequities, and cultural collisions & providing a voice for the unheard on the stage and beyond” — they’ve done some really interesting shows, although everything at the moment is virtual.

For suitable memberships and gift cards, look up art museums, science museums, history museums, and theaters in their area. Any sort of science museum membership seems like a good gift for people who have demonstrated a significant deficit in scientific knowledge since March, although use your own judgment if you’re concerned that this person might be inclined to go straight in the minute things open up, unmasked — you don’t want to give the gift of COVID to a museum staffer.

You could also gift a restaurant gift certificate: to make it a bad gift, you can either give a gift card to a place that’s doing takeout, but with food that doesn’t transport well, or you can give a $25 gift card to a place where a meal is going to cost at least $50.

Masks as Gifts

Got a maskhole in your life? I’m 100% in favor of gifting that person a mask. You can still buy a wide variety of handmade masks on Etsy in a plethora of designs, and you can include a note explaining that just like people give three-year-olds underwear with their favorite characters to get them to use a toilet, you’ve bought them a mask with (Batman, their favorite sports team, Bible quotes, etc.) to encourage them to use this simple, necessary device, and by the way, it goes over their nose. If they actually have a reason to find masks difficult to wear there are a number of add-on gadgets you can get, including inserts that hold it out slightly from your face, extender straps that are an alternative to putting the things around your ears, and stick-on aluminum strips that help you fit it better over your nose so your glasses don’t fog.

Charitable Gifts

This has been such an utterly wretched year that I’m finding it hard to humorously suggest that you give someone a Naked Mole Rat Species Adoption to call them a dick. There’s an awful lot of need just about everywhere, and if you want to make a charitable gift in someone’s honor, I’d suggest a food shelf, homeless shelter, shelter for victims of domestic violence, or any group in your area that’s helping to keep people housed, fed, and safe.

Books!

My book CATFISHING ON CATNET came out in 2019 (just in time for holiday giving last year) and is still available and you can definitely give it as an (excellent) present. You can also preorder CHAOS ON CATNET, which will be out in April.

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

My Twitter feed: @naomikritzer

And my fiction that was published this year, in case you missed it:

Monster, January 2020 in Clarkesworld.
Little Free Library, April 2020 on Tor.com.
A Star Without Shine, May 2020, written for the Decameron Project.

I also wrote an essay, “Didn’t I Write This Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality” for Tor.com.

Happy holidays! And whatever good luck traditions or rituals you might know of for the New Year, let’s all try to do ours for 2021.

Gifts for People You Hate, 2019

Posted on December 1, 2019 by naomikritzer

Earlier this month, Captain Awkward had a letter from someone whose crappy sister and brother-in-law was giving her deliberately bad gifts. Not in a “let’s exchange gag gifts” kind of way, either, they gave her a bunch of obviously used DVDs for shows she’s not interested in for her birthday.

I actually clicked on that with real trepidation — worried that this might be someone who had clearly read my suggestions and implemented them but for a perfectly nice person (the sort of person who reads Captain Awkward!) Fortunately for my own peace of mind, it was clearly someone who was adhering more to the “open declaration of war” approach. These were not subtly bad gifts.

But just to be clear: please do not use these suggestions to bully perfectly nice people instead of having an adult conversation that goes, “hey, can we just agree not to exchange gifts among adults? I would love to get together for the dinner and skip the present-opening, could we maybe all make a donation toward [some mutually agreeable cause]?”

No, this is a guide for people who have to buy a gift for the sister-in-law who refuses to make any vegetarian/gluten free/edible-to-you food at the big family Christmas dinner other than carrot sticks. Or for those who need a present for one of those Theoretically-Optional-But-Actually-Totally-Mandatory office events, and you drew the name of that person who puts microwave popcorn in the office microwave, enters the 4 and a half minutes the packages always claim it’s going to take, and then nips off to the bathroom. Or maybe you’re Tiffany Trump and shopping for your father. There are, let’s be honest, people who deserve bad presents.

Annual disclaimer: I don’t have to give gifts to anyone I don’t like; this list was inspired by the traumas of friends. If I’ve ever given you a gift that was terrible, it was genuine cluelessness on my part and I really was trying to get you a present you’d like. (This sort of cluelessness is super common, and provides everyone else with crucial plausible deniability when choosing gifts inspired by this list.) Also, if you give me presents, I promise I am not scrutinizing them for signs that you secretly hate me; I’m thinking “oh wow, a PRESENT.”

ON TO THE LIST.

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Gifts for People You Hate, 2018

Posted on December 12, 2018 by naomikritzer

It’s that season again: the season for gift-buying guides. There are gift-buying guides out there for just about every category of age and interest, but I’m one of very few people writing a gift-buying guide for people you are socially required to give a gift to but frankly can’t stand. Whether it’s a family member or a coworker, sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to just cough up a wrapped object than to go through the drama of opting out, and I am here for you.

(There was a letter to Dear Prudence this year — second letter down, and be warned, the first letter is a very different sort of horrifying — from an indignant mother-in-law who gave her daughter-in-law a gift card for yarn, and was mad because the daughter-in-law used the yarn she bought to make her a beautiful bedspread as a gift the following year. If the daughter-in-law is here looking for ideas, WELCOME and OH MY GOD YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW IS THE WORST, HOLY CRAP, and this year may I suggest that you give her a toilet brush holder that looks like a cowboy boot and save your beautiful hand-made creations for people who appreciate them?)

Annual disclaimer: I don’t have to give gifts to anyone I don’t like. If I’ve ever given you a gift that was terrible, it was genuine cluelessness on my part and I really was trying to get you a present you’d like. (This sort of cluelessness is super common, and provides everyone else with crucial plausible deniability when choosing gifts inspired by this list.)

ON TO THE IDEAS.

Clothes They Won’t Wear

Some new photorealistic fabric-printing techniques have come along in the last few years and have resulted in some truly amazing clothing items, like this sweatshirt.

A hooded sweatshirt that depicts a sloth with an eyepatch, cape, and lightsaber riding a fire-breathing unicorn under a rainbow.

Is that sweatshirt the best hoodie ever made, or the absolute worst? I mean, the great thing about this sweatshirt is you could buy one for both your best friend and your worst enemy and potentially get exactly the response you’re hoping for from both, depending on who you’re friends with. This sweatshirt is available in a variety of other designs (from this and other vendors) including Christmas T-Rex, monocle cat rides a unicorn, and space bears (also lots of really, really ugly patriotic-themed ones) so if you’re bracing for a large family gift-opening event you could get everyone a sweatshirt and just switch up the designs to suit the recipients.

I feel like the ideal gift-item that will be worn once and then occupy closet space forever is a knitted wool item that’s attractive, yet unbearably itchy. There are two problems with this: (1) wool sweaters are kind of expensive and (2) yarn quality has improved since the 1980s and I think there are fewer itchy sweaters around than there used to be. You could, however, pick one up at a thrift shop, have it carefully dry cleaned, and pretend you got it at a craft fair. Mittens, hats, and scarves are also really unpleasant when made with itchy wool.

Gadgets They Won’t Use

Back in 2014, I suggested giving someone a cheap, dysfunctional SmartWatch to fill their life with frustration. Those watches are still around and are sufficiently functional that it won’t be obvious that the goal was torment, but still dysfunctional enough to guarantee hours of annoyance. This one typically gets less than a half day of battery life, and the time and date reset every time you turn it off. It’s under $20 and available with two-day shipping. This one broke after someone wore it in the rain. (You’ll want to check “other sellers” if you’ll need it before Christmas.) This one gave someone a rash.

For a lower-tech gadget, how about a cool-looking but completely nonfunctional barometer? (I mean, even a working barometer is solidly in the category of gadgets that most people will have no use for. If I want to know what the weather is going to be like, I check my weather app like everyone else.) As a bonus, the dysfunctional barometer is too pretty to throw away, but too fragile to put anywhere it might get knocked off the table.

Sadly, this smartphone-controlled salt dispenser is not actually available yet (and the Twitter account has been dead for a year, which makes me think it may never be available.) Apparently it was supposed to tell you how much salt you should put on your food (because goodness knows, none of us can figure that out for ourselves without a smartphone helping us out) and it plays music! Or would, if it had been made.

Overspecialized Kitchen Gadgets That Will Take Up Shelf and Drawer Space

This category never gets old, because new weird, overspecialized gadgets come out every year.

You can get a very inexpensive mini waffle maker. The thing about waffles is that they’re delicious, but kind of a pain in the ass to make, and making them really small does not actually make them any less of a pain in the ass. Alternately, you could get a specialized gadget that makes waffles shaped like bowls: the maker is larger than the mini-maker, and also, waffle bowls are an even less practical food item than mini waffles.

Also available: a specialized omelet maker. There are people out there who eat enough omelets that they would make good use of an omelet maker; obviously, if you’re looking on this list for ideas for gifts for that person, you should go with the mini waffle maker instead. Finally, there’s a breakfast sandwich maker that will simultaneously toast your muffin, heat your pre-cooked breakfast meat, melt your cheese, and cook your egg; it has rave reviews from all the breakfast sandwich eaters who love it, but in order to make use of it you definitely need to be the sort of person who will have the eggs, ham, muffins or bread, and cheese all in the fridge simultaneously. Buy it for someone you dislike who is definitely not that sort of person, but feels like they should be.

There are a lot of little hand-held gadgets that are going to be a pointless waste of drawer space for most people. Here’s one that slices avocados and another that makes perfect pineapple rings. A lot of these very specialized devices are genuinely useful if someone is (a) disabled or (b) eats a lot of that particular food. Most people do not like fresh pineapple enough that they really need a gadget that does nothing but slice it up. Alternately, here’s a strawberry slicer that looks like a strawberry or an egg slicer that looks like a whale. Finally, there’s this lettuce slicer, which frankly baffles me. It’s really not clear to me how you get the lettuce sliced all the way through, using this thing. Also, you need to have enough manual dexterity to use a knife to cut the lettuce into a small enough chunk to get it in the holder, which is probably harder than just slicing it the rest of the way up. I don’t know who this is for, other than that super annoying coworker you drew in the office gift exchange.

Throw Blankets They Won’t Want On Their Couch

Throw blankets are one of those generic, always-okay things to give, or at least they are in my climate.

There are lovely holiday-themed throw blankets available and the thing about these is, the recipient will be opening them on December 25th, and they’ll be as dated as the Christmas tree by January 1st, at which point they’ll probably want to shove them into a closet, where they’ll take up space until next year. (This wouldn’t work if you were buying a gift for me; if it’s a soft blanket we’d just leave it out until spring, when all the blankets get put away. We also have a Halloween dish towel that lives in the kitchen towel drawer and gets pulled out and used year-round.)

There are also some really ugly throw blankets, like this one of horses posing for a group selfie or this one for “sports fans” with balls all over it. I’m pretty sure I know people who would LOVE this one with three wolves howling at the moon but they probably wouldn’t be thrilled about the fact that this blanket apparently sheds everywhere. Sadly, the ones with Elvis printed on them are all more than I think you want to spend for this sort of gift.

Do-It-Yourself Gift Basket (of crap)

To make a gift basket, you basically need the following: a basket, some raffia filler, one of those cellophane bags to keep everything in there (can be optional), and ribbon. And then you fill it with a selection of goodies.

If it’s for someone you like, you can do a selection of fancy cheeses, chocolate, jam, gourmet sodas, etc. If it’s for someone you don’t like, the possibilities are just as endless. For that “no, seriously, it’s a present!” vibe, look for stuff in fancy packaging; for the “oh god what is in this?” reaction, look for stuff with artificial sweeteners.

Some specific possibilities: go to the spice section and look for the spices that come in fancy jars, and then pick some that you think your recipient is unlikely to use more than twice a year. Lots of cookbooks will tell you how much better whole spices are than the pre-ground ones. And, I mean, they’re not wrong, but most of us use pre-ground spices anyway because grinding up spices (other than pepper, which goes in its own specialized grinder) is a pain in the ass. Available as whole spices in pretty glass jars at many grocery store: caraway seeds; cardamom pods; celery seed; cloves; cumin seed; coriander seed; mustard seed. Lots of these are things that very few people use all that frequently anyway. My grocery store also has dried chunks of shallots and crystallized ginger. Pick a selection and throw in a jar of Himalayan pink salt to tie it all together, ideally a package with crystals the size of popcorn kernels, because those are completely useless unless you grind them up. Then don’t put in a salt grinder. (Or, do put in a salt grinder because seriously, there’s absolutely no reason to use freshly ground salt instead of just buying salt with the crystals pre-sized to what you want and putting it in a shaker.)

You could also do a “coffee basket” with a package of attractive yet terrible coffee (did you know that there’s a Folgers Cappuccino, a Maxwell House French Vanilla, and a Hills Brothers English Toffee? I have not actually taste-tested any of these but I think the odds are high that they’re terrible) and two very ugly mugs, like those generic Santa-Snowman-Penguin mugs they sell at every Walgreens this time of year, or something like this guy.

You could do a “snack basket”: buy one of those multipacks of little cracker sandwiches (like these), break up the multipack because somehow a dozen separate little packages look better than a box of 12, add a bag of Funyons and a pack of jerky in the weirdest flavor you can find. (Or get the turkey kind. The turkey version of everything is reliably less tasty than the normal kind.) You could throw in a bottle of the Sparkling Ice drink. It doesn’t even matter what flavor you choose; all Sparkling Ice drinks taste vile because they’re full of artificial sweeteners. Alternately, there’s now a Watermelon Perrier in little cans.

You could also skip the basket entirely and buy a Seasonal Popcorn tin at the store and stick a ribbon on it. DONE.

One cautionary note: bear in mind that whatever you package up might be offered around, so make sure it’s something you’re willing to choke down at least a little of. (This is less of a risk with spices but a very high risk with anything that looks like a cookie.)

Charitable Gifts

As always, you can give someone a toilet (“piss off”), a stove (“here’s your symbolic lump of coal”), or manure (“no further explanation needed”) through Oxfam.

The World Wildlife Fund still doesn’t let you adopt a blobfish, but has symbolic animal adoptions for the Koala Bear (when you want to say, “you coast by because people inexplicably think you’re adorable, even though you’re actually a lazy jerk”), the Black Jaguar (when you want to say “shut up, colonizer“), and the Crocodile (when you want to say, “you’re a dinosaur.”) (The Black Jaguar in particular might also make a pretty decent charitable gift for someone you actually like who would think it was cool, and I’ll note the WWF is making it super clear that yes, this is a Black Panther!)

Edited to add: and in response to gifts from those people you hate, Geek Calligraphy has the perfect subtly hostile thank-you card. (And also a covertly hostile Mother’s Day card, for people with terrible mothers they nonetheless send cards to. Order it now, and you’ll have it when you remember you need to get a card in May!)

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

My Twitter feed: @naomikritzer

And my fiction that was published online this year:

Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, September in Apex.
The Thing About Ghost Stories, December in Uncanny.

Also new this year: a short story in this anthology, which would make a great gift and is under $3.50 for Kindle.

My fiction published online last year:

Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe, Clarkesworld, March 2017.
Paradox, Uncanny, June 2017

You could also order my short story collection, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories.

Gifts For People You Hate, 2017

Posted on November 23, 2017 by naomikritzer

Every year I sit down to write this and think, “what am I even going to come up with this year? I have used up all possible Bad Gift Ideas and am doubtless in reruns at this point” and then I start poking around looking at what’s available for purchase on Amazon:

This is a wine-bottle holder and it’s supposed to look like the unicorn is drinking your wine. I guess.

And I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of astonishingly terrible objects that one could give to those people to whom one is required by circumstance and etiquette to give gifts.

Maybe your office has a Secret Santa exchange, and you don’t officially have to participate except at your last performance review you got dinged for “not being enough of a team player, so you kinda do have to participate, and then you get assigned to buy a gift for that person who puts all their calls on speakerphone and leaves dishes in the office sink. Or maybe you’ve tried to talk your family into just exchanging festive greetings and this resulted in DRAMA so you’ve resigned yourself to buying gifts forever for that family member you try not to get stuck next to during the meal.

Sometimes you’re shopping for a gift because it’s worth that $15 to keep the peace and even though you know that, you resent every moment trying to figure out what would please this person. And that’s where my shopping guide comes in! Free yourself from the burden of trying to make an asshole happy, and embrace the idea of giving them something that won’t.

There are certain basic principles that apply every year. It should be cheap, but untraceably cheap. (Buying them a hand-crocheted who-knows-what for $2 at a thrift shop and pretending it came from a craft show is a terrific idea but you will need to make sure it looks new and doesn’t have that distinctive, identifiable Smell Of Savers wafting from it.) It should be easy to get, and it should look like a gift you might honestly have picked out because you thought they’d like it.

(And a final disclaimer: I don’t actually buy gifts for anyone I don’t like, so if I have given you a bad gift in the past, I promise this was not an intentional slight!)

ON TO THE SHOPPING.

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Gifts for People You Hate, 2016

Posted on December 3, 2016 by naomikritzer

This has been quite a year, hasn’t it? It’s been the sort of shit year that leaves a lot of people dreading the holidays. So although I started this series years ago as a nod toward the idea that most of us heave a sigh and do whatever dance of holiday obligation has been laid out for us, I’m going to start by making a case for self-care. Make the plans that feel right to you, see the people whose company you enjoy, eat foods you like, give gifts only if you want to.

For some people out there, though, self-care can involve conflict avoidance, and that may mean buying a gift for someone they loathe because presenting a festively-wrapped box with a present inside is just easier than opting out.

As always, I tried to adhere to certain basic principles. The gifts should be cheap, but they shouldn’t be obviously cheap. They should be easy to find/purchase (which is why I provide so many Amazon links). And they should be the sort of gift you can present as if it’s an honest attempt to give them something they’ll like, even as it’s totally, totally wrong.

(And the usual disclaimer: I don’t give gifts to anyone I don’t like, so if I give you something horrible, it was accidental.)

Occupational Novelties

One of my college friends had a box of mugs, all of which said something like “world’s best teacher” or “I (HEART) MY TEACHER” or “check it out, it’s a picture of an apple, on a mug, for a teacher!” on them. His mom, of course, was a teacher, and she was inundated with teacher-themed mugs as gifts.

There are occupations that seem to attract related tchotchkes: doctors, lawyers, cops, teachers, nurses, and military service people are solidly on that list. You can present a themed mug, t-shirts, decorative wall plaque, or throw pillow, and cheerfully assure them that this made you think of them. They’ll thank you with feigned enthusiasm and add it to their collection of mugs, t-shirts, plaques, and pillows.

If it’s some profession that you almost never see stuff for (garbage collector, IRS auditor, agricultural extension agent…) then either this will be exciting and novel, or they’ll have twelve iterations of that item. Use your best judgment. (A lot depends on the rest of the family.) (Honestly, even if they’ve never seen an IRS auditor Christmas ornament before…this may be a suitably terrible gift.)

Terrible Gifts for Animal Lovers

There is an entire universe of bad animal tchotchkes out there. For example, this cat, which is holding a salt and pepper shaker and which just looks weirdly wrong. Cats don’t sit like that, they don’t hold their arms like that, and that is a seriously weird facial expression. Or there’s this clock, which comes in a wide variety of dog breeds. Normally, if you’re trying to buy a bad gift for a dog lover, one easy approach is to buy the wrong breed. Like, if the person owns golden retrievers, buy them something with pugs all over it. In this case, each dog is sufficiently off kilter that you should definitely buy the RIGHT breed.

Apparently there are now dog-breed-specific Monopoly variants. You’ll want to use your best judgment here, though: don’t give one of these if you’re going to get roped into a game of Monopoly. And from the department of “WHY? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT THIS?” is a toaster that toasts a dog onto your bread. (One of the irritated reviewers notes that in order for the dog shape to show up properly, you’d better be using white bread. There’s also just the fact that when I make toast, it’s because I want toast, not because I want bread with a tiny design branded into the center of the slice.)

In the category of “bad gifts I have personally given with the best of intentions” would be a Siberian husky angel Christmas ornament (it wasn’t this one, but same basic idea) I once gave my mother-in-law. My in-laws raised and trained sled dogs and they were, in fact, amused by husky tchotchkes. But my mother-in-law looked at the husky angel with deep and obvious skepticism and said, “I have never yet met a husky that deserved that halo.” (Sadly, there are no husky-as-devil ornaments for people to hang on their tree. I think that would’ve made a good foll0wup the next year.)

There are quite a few people who have some animal they like a lot, and a collection. Giving them something for their collection tends to be a good gift. To make it a bad gift, find something that’s way too big; that’s supposed to be useful but definitely isn’t (like it’s supposed to hold umbrellas, but it only holds the sort of long, skinny, non-collapsible umbrellas that almost no one carries these days); that’s ugly and weird looking; that’s identical to some item they already have, or that’s the wrong category. People who want little elephants to put on a shelf probably do not actually want a giant elephant afghan blanket. People who love unicorns may not actually want photorealistic unicorn leggings. Etc.

Terrible Gifts for Drinkers

***I’m going to preface this section by stating for the record that I am not suggesting that anything on this list would be an appropriate gift to a person with an actual drinking problem. (In particular, don’t gift a booze-related gift to someone who’s been going to AA.)***

So let’s talk about wine. I like wine. I drink wine with my dinner quite regularly, mostly fairly cheap (like $10/bottle) red wines. (We used to drink a lot of Malbec. Then in the last year everyone else discovered Malbec and now the prices are going up.) You don’t actually need anything all that fancy to drink wine. I do think actual wine glasses are worth keeping around, and you need something to open bottles with. If you want to get a little bit fancy, some sort of vacuum-style plug you can shove in to an unfinished bottle will ensure it keeps longer. (You can, in fact, just shove the cork partway back in, and 99% of the time it’ll taste fine for a couple of days.)

There are all sorts of wine accessories you can buy someone that are pointless and bulky. For instance, all the weird items that will hold a single bottle of wine for you, including one that looks like a sparkly pink stilleto shoe, a some novelty gadgets that defy gravity, and this caddy that lets you dress your wine up as Santa for some reason.

You could also buy a decanter. Decanters are not pointless; they do let you decant wine, which I know some people like to do. (I have been enthusiastically enjoying wine for years without a decanter, and I don’t feel like I’m doing it wrong. Feel free to make your case for decanters in the comments if you want.) The obnoxious thing about decanters is that they tend to be large and weirdly proportioned and glass, i.e., super annoying to store. Here’s a reasonably cheap one. Or if you think they might already have a decanter, you could get them one that’s larger and weirder looking and thus, presumably, better.

There are also fancy-ass wine bottle openers, like this cordless electric wine bottle opener. Some of the best bad gifts try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist, and super-fancy wine bottle openers are a good example of this. (There are people who need a fancy wine bottle opener due to arthritis, but most people can use a standard-issue corkscrew and probably already own a couple.) Since it’s rechargeable, the recipient will have to leave it set up on their counter, with the charger plugged into an outlet, in order to ever use it.

The vacuum-type wine bottle stoppers serve a purpose, but a decorative wine stopper is really no more useful than a cork, and if it’s made of decorative blown glass will have to be carefully stored between uses so it doesn’t break all over the place.

Finally, here is a set of stemless silicone wine glasses with a dorky “his & hers” design. The idea is that with these nice unbreakable glasses, you can bring your wine with you on picnics and drink it out of something classier than a Solo cup. Several reviews note that these cups smell weird and plasticky and the smell never goes away, and also the flexible silicon sort of collapses in on itself while you’re trying to hold your cup. (Bonus points if you give this to someone who lives in a state like Minnesota where drinking is actually illegal in all the parks, and you’re going to want to drink your wine out of something non-wine-looking anyway just to avoid potential hassles.)

For the beer drinker, there’s a wide variety of novelty bottle openers out there, including mermaids, the Milennium Falcon, and a bunch of openers that look like weaponry. Pick something that looks uncomfortable. You can also go the overly bulky route with this complicated magnetic thingie (this one’s actually desirable if you want un-bent bottle caps, but otherwise is a large and complex alternative to one of the simplest mechanical devices in existence), a countertop style that will take up space in their kitchen, one that has to be mounted on a wall, and one that mounts to the fridge with a very strong magnet but apparently doesn’t work for crap.

The beer equivalent of a decanter is probably a beer glass set. There are totally people who use them, but the vast majority of beer drinkers just drink their beer out of the bottle (or can). For extra irritation value, though, here is a set of 10oz beer glasses, since they’re probably drinking 12oz bottles.

Deplorable Gifts for Trump Supporters

I was going to suggest this mug (which accurately portrays Trump as both hideous and empty-headed) or this t-shirt (which is a parody of itself that most Trump supporters probably won’t really recognize) but I’ll be honest with you: I think Trump supporters, more than any others, need a charitable gift this year.

Charitable Gifts

For the person who voted for Donald Trump because ABORTION:
The Ali Forney Center
Lost-n-Found Youth
(Both organizations are shelters for homeless LGBT teenagers. You may also have a similar charity in your town.)
I know the lives of children are precious to you, so I have donated in your honor to a charity that cherishes and protects lives that have been thrown away.

For the person who voted for Donald Trump because GUNS.
ACLU
Freedom is important to both of us, so I’ve donated in your honor to an organization committed to defending our constitutional rights.

For the person who voted for Donald Trump because BUILD A WALL.
#NODAPL
I’ve donated in your honor to support Americans who are working together to defend themselves against violent outsiders.

For the person who voted for Donald Trump because LAW AND ORDER.
RAINN
National Resource Center on Domestic Violence
I know you care deeply about crime and crime victims, so I’ve donated in your honor to an organization that supports, protects, and assists victims of serious crimes.

For the person who voted for Donald Trump because BLUE LIVES MATTER.
Everytown for Gun Safety
I’ve donated in your honor to support an organization committed to providing safer streets for police officers (and everyone else).

For the Donald Trump voter who is sincerely outraged at the idea that Donald Trump supporters are a bunch of racists:
SPLC
I know you don’t condone hate groups or hate crimes, so I thought you would appreciate a donation in your honor to a group that is working to make racism socially unacceptable again.

For the person who voted for Trump because they were convinced Obama and then Hillary were going to impose Sharia on them:
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
I donated in your honor to a vigilant watchdog group protecting us from religious tyranny.

For the person who proudly refers to themself as “deplorable”:
At this point I’m in favor of an open declaration of war.
The Clinton Foundation
I donated in your honor to the Clinton Foundation. MERRY CHRISTMAS, MOTHERFUCKER.

Happy holidays to all my readers!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Also, if you’re amused by my writing, check out my essays at Bitter Empire: http://bitterempire.com/author/naomi-kritzer/

My Twitter feed: @naomikritzer

And my fiction that was published online this year:

Zombies in Winter

or last year:

Cat Pictures Please (Clarkesworld, January 2015.)
Wind (Apex, April 2015.)
So Much Cooking (Clarkesworld, November 2015.)
The Good Son (Lightspeed, March 2015 — reprint. Originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, 2009.)

And if you just can’t get enough of my writing, you could consider buying:
Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories (short story collection)
Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories (short story collection)
My novels (there are five of them)

(I also have a short story collection coming next year from Fairwood Press! Which will be available in PRINT as well as e-book format! No “buy” link for that one yet, though.)

Will Tell Stories For Food

Naomi Kritzer's blog

Category Archives: gift shopping

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Gifts for People You Hate, 2022

Gifts for People You Hate 2021: Supply Chain Mayhem

Gifts for People You Hate 2020: Pandemic Procrastination Edition

Gifts for People You Hate, 2019

Gifts for People You Hate, 2018

Gifts For People You Hate, 2017

Gifts for People You Hate, 2016