Re-gifting Horror Stories! Can You Re-gift Succesfully Ever? Read This Article to Find Out

It was a couple of days after Christmas when I went for a belated Christmas party at my cousins house. He wasn't able to get back from abroad in time for the holidays so we were going to hold two Christmas celebrations.

It was a cold night and the light dusting of snow that we got earlier in the day had turned in to a sheet of ice that had the most delightful shading of black.

There were cop cars, their flashing lights giving off a festive feel to the streets, as their cruisers were on the sides of the road and they in vein tried to help stranded motorists out of the ditch or away from the telephone pole that they parked their car against at a respectable 35-mph.

I was tired, the holidays really drained me that year and quite frankly celebrating Christmas a second time was a fate I dreaded. Frankly, I could handle going to the store and attempting a guess at what my cousins warped mind would desire.

"Screw it," I was going to try and get through this second celebration on the cheap. I bought some discounted eggnog at the packaging store. Dug out an unopened gift I had received from someone several Christmas' ago, made sure to wrap it as nicely as I could. I even found one of those stick on fake bows at the bottom of my junk drawer and hot-glued it to the crumpled paper.

You guessed it, not only was it a re-gift but I had re-gifted it to the same person who originally gave it to me. He laughed it off and said it was ok but I wanted to melt into the carpet and disappear.

Re-gifting, in and of itself is not a bad thing. You received something that you'll never use and as long as you don't use it and attempt to repackage then everything is fine. Let someone else get some use and enjoyment out of the re-girted gift. Just make sure you remember who gave you that gift which you plan to re-gift.

Another nightmare of a re-gifting disaster came from my sister. She had received a video game that she had no interest in so she never even opened it. Well, it lay there on her shelf, unopened and factory sealed. We were then informed that one of our cousins, who's a hardcore gamer, was going to come with much of the family to celebrate Christmas.

Well, my sister had already spent a fortune on gifts and she was looking to get some relief from spending money. So she found the game, wrapped it up and put our cousins name on it. Gently placed under the tree, my sister was certain her gift would go over very well as it was a popular video game.

Suffice it to say that our cousin was underwhelmed when he opened his gift. It was true that the game was a popular one and it was true that it was a hot item when my sister first received it. The problem was that the world of video games moves very quickly and sure enough, our cousin no longer even had that gaming format and his parents had already bought him the new release from the same series that the re-gifted game was from.

Ok, that wasn't quite a disaster but it wasn't pleasant.

I had a Christmas Fruitcake re-gifted back to me but that may have been a form of revenge rather then a disaster re-gifting story. I believe that the Fruitcake was a disaster in itself.

I know that this is supposed to be an article about re-gifting horror stories but I thought I'd mention one that went well. I'm just putting this in here to illustrate that re-gifting can be a great thing, if done right.

Once again, it was Christmas and my bank account was screaming for mercy. I started looking through my closets to see if there was anything I could re-gift. There it was, in the back of my closet. In it's originall box and unopened. A beautiful, leaded crystal, spirits carafe. I had no use for it as I don't drink and it was a lovely piece that my dad is enjoying to this day.