Share a tale of the worst gift miser in your family or circle of friends.

My sister makes shamelessly cheap handmade "craft" items and passes them off as expensive gifts. We're doing a gift exchange with a limit of $30. She does up a couple of pot holders using the 50's era loom and hook with pieces of rag and then claims she could charge $30 for them in any given craft show.

Whomever is hosting our holiday party usually has an extra gift hanging around - with nuts or cocoa - for whichever poor schlemiel my sister draws for a gift. Oh yeah, did I mention that she's 53 with a relatively high IQ?

Since we try to keep things peaceful at the holidays, I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying something like: "Thirty dollars for that crap!!?? Damn, I'd be at the craft sale selling them by the boat load if I could get $30 a pop! I mean, aren't they just rags and five minutes of labor???"

One year she took a sweater box, a shirt box, an oats canister and a couple of other small boxes and glued fabric all over them to be used, as she explained,in the boudoir as catch-all boxes. The poor old lady who received one got to the sweater box, opened and announced, "I think someone forgot the gift." You should have seen her precious expression when my mom explained that the "box" was the present.

on the left breast.

The only gift worse than that, that I can think of, is the men's shirt she gave my ex-husband (her son!).
It was a shirt with a Nehru collar (three sizes too small) that smelled from her dead husband's cologne.

Really.

She's a Christmas gift show-off. She makes WAAAYY more money than my brother or me. We tend to give each other books or cds or dvds. One or two per holiday and that's it. My sister gives us all sorts of crap--loads of presents. Almost all of it stuff I neither want nor need. Real crap (I hope "The Blue Collar Comedy" guys don't have a new dvd out...cuz I don't need another one!), but lots of it!! It's her way of letting us know she makes more money than us, and it's very irritating. My mom once asked her to stick to our Amazon wish lists. But no, I need a couple of Green Bay Packers jackets. And hats. And sweatshirts. And watches. And doggy sweaters. And mugs. And...

feel free to send it my way!

:hi:

I kept one from a couple of years ago, and gave last year's to the homeless shelter here. But I'm likely to get another. I'll let you know.

She didn't just have money, she had MONEY. For our wedding, we got a plastic vase which appeared to have been purchased from a gas station (seriously). When she passed away, she left all the money to a Florida megachurch.

mikey_the_rat