Do your christmas presents make you feel guilty?

fuckin Xmas.

I don't think I'd receive any dough worth mentioning for my one cd, one pocket knife and one jar of honey (=teh sweet presents o'mine), let alone the chocolate that was eaten and declenched sometime round December 28th...

I'm trying to rid my possessions of crap, not take more in.

Everyone thinks I'm crazy, but I don't need to see my parents having to wheelbarrow my things into the house.

I also don't need my dad calling me up, going HAS SHE LISTENED TO THE RAY STEVENS CD YET? YOU LET HER ENJOY IT, OKAY?

This year I both gave and received lovely, useful things that were carefully chosen. I just thought, by the end, that I had enough stuff and so returned a couple of things that I didn't really want anyway.

Did you register? If so, you asked for what you received.

The birthday and Christmas presents I got this year from work were really good!

God, I wish I could get my wife to go for this, but she would want to donate as well as buy presents, instead of donating in lieu of presents. I just got the statement for the credit card she used this year on mail order stuff...she told her brother "oh yeah, we didn't spend as much this year." Right, right...

Fuck retail therapy.

(they're really cosy-looking, though)

Gee, why didn't I think of that? He is really just very unimaginative and prefers to do all of his shopping at Macy's.

I put up batteries and she put up roller skates. We still got 144 wine glasses even neither of us drink wine.

To be fair, I AM happy to have some decent pots and pans and a matching set of stoneware (we got heavy duty stuff that's really hard to break).

Part of the guilt of it all also came from all the shipping materials that were used in the process - I was sickened by the quantities of foam packing peanuts and bubble wrap we were discarding every week.

I just think it's in bad taste to complain about gifts that you received from throwing a party that practically has receiving gifts written into it. I mean, if I had a birthday party, I wouldn't complain about all the useless gifts I got.

x-post

Everyone in the families submits a registry of sorts in early October - this exchanging of lists was, at one point, celebrated with a sloppy joe dinner - and these lists are passed around so you can buy stuff for people. It's pretty mercenary, and kind of shocked my wife when she was first exposed to it, but it works pretty well. Since these three all live so close to each other, I think they got tired of having to awkwardly return things that they didn't like or explain why they weren't wearing or using certain items so this pretty much solves the problem.

That being said, I sometimes do feel guilty about stuff. My inlaws in particular are big into giving cards with money, more than I feel is necessary. My parents have sort of mellowed out but my mom is still super geeked about buying people shit for Christmas.

And wedding registries are key - people buy you shit anyway, might as well steer them in the right direction. We still ended up with a bunch of old lady crystal candy dishes and stuff like that.

So now I get only things I need, generally perfumes I know I like, pyjamas and underwear. I have learnt that people tend to appreciate having a list of things to choose from rather than the headache of trudging round the shops hoping to find something that I might like.

Christmas is fun again!

I was very lucky the first time I got married, because I genuinely didn't have a house full of stuff already from living together for years, and one of our friends organized a group gift of an excellent dinner service, which I still have every bit of, almost ten years later (no longer have the husband it came with, though).

I feel guilty buying a sandwich now, it's like 31,000 food miles according to the news the other day :(

haha, me too!

We never actually announced where our gift-lists were, it wasn't like "please come to our wedding and by the way, we want stuff from Markies or Argos". It's such a standard practice that people asked us/our parents anyway and they were duly pointed at the appropriate shops. Not one person was invited with the aim of getting us a present, several people probably didn't get us anything. I don't care, I had lots of people there that I wanted, and whether they got us a gift was incidental. It was fairly obvious lots of people were going to buy us stuff, it's what people do. We needed stuff. We'd have got it anyway, ourselves, but I'd rather not have a house full of unmatching, useless or duplicated stuff. Or spent the first week of my married life standing in shops returning things.

I love getting presents. In November and December we have a kind of embargo in our family on buying things for ourselves. If you see something in the shops that you want, you can't buy it. You have to write it on your list. If you don't get it for Christmas, you can buy it afterwards if you still want it.

Idyllic as this sounds, and it usually works quite well, I still have seven pairs of pyjamas I don't wear, and an assortment of ridiculous mugs that came wrapped in plastic with undrinkable cappuccino/hot chocolate sachets in them, and that don't last very well in the dishwasher. I think I might just take these things to the charity shop immediately in future.