Do you like white elephant gift exchanges?

Two years ago I was the unlucky recipient of the worst white elephant gift ever: rollerblades in men’s size 8 / women’s size 10. Below are a few of the reasons I strongly disliked this “gift”:

• It wasn’t my size
• There was no gift receipt
• I wasn’t sure it was new, and this wasn’t one of those “bring your used crap” gift exchanges
• I actually brought a nice gift that people would appreciate
• I don’t like joke gifts

I mean, I think I would be fine with some joke gifts, like a new whoopee cushion or something. These rollerblades, though, were 100% useless junk to me. I thought about bringing them to Goodwill, but ultimately just left them in my garage and brought it back a year later to the same exact white elephant gift exchange. I had hoped the original gifter would have ended up with it, but alas, another unsuspecting soul got it, and she just left it in her cubicle when she rotated to a different team.

This week we had our annual white elephant gift exchange again, and I opted out since I didn’t want to subject another person to the worst “gift” ever. I found out that another coworker also brought back their white elephant gift from last year, since it was also useless to them.

On the whole, though, I was glad to see that most people actually brought decent gifts:

• blanket (I got a blanket last year and loved it)
• giant Nerf gun
• Codenames (regular and pictures)
• gift cards

One of the gifts was an assortment of cat toys, which I thought was a terrible white elephant gift idea, but it was actually stolen (ostensibly by a cat owner).

All of this just reminded me of a white elephant gift exchange many years ago when I brought an imitation Flowbee (it was previously gifted to me, and it was new). It got a lot of laughs but I felt kind of bad since a good friend ended up with it and nobody stole it from him. A year later, though, he brought it to another white elephant gift exchange, and apparently people were fighting each other for it.

Which just goes to show: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure…unless it’s a pair of rollerblades that’s not in your size, in which case it’s just trash.