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What's a good joke present to get your SO for Christmas?

My dad always likes to tell us about the Christmas when my uncle bought my aunt a tin opener (a good one!) for Christmas, she was apparently rather unimpressed but the story has given years worth of good laughs.

I also remember when my dad bought a holiday in New York for my mum and himself for Christmas, but the tickets were in a small envelope right at the bottom of a HUGE box filled with packing peanuts.

What terrible/joke presents can you think of that would be a good laugh on Christmas day?

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  • I proposed to my wife at Christmas by putting the ring in a bigger box so she was surprised. It was a box for skincare product, and she was actually excited for it before she even opened it to see the ring. Obviously she was happy for the proposal, but she also seemed a little disappointed she didn't get skincare stuff.

    The following Christmas, I got her a tiny container of a skincare product she liked and put it in a ring box.

  • Me and my extended family have begun a tradition of giving each other silly joke gifts instead of serious ones.

    • My father in law doesn't drink alcohol so I got him "alcohol-free" beer. It was just an empty beer bottle. Technically alcohol-free!
    • a couple of days before Christmas, my husband came back from doing the grocery shopping. I stole most of the non-perishable items when he wasn't looking, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He thought I was a mind reader and gotten him exactly what he was planning to buy for himself until he saw them all together and realized it was his own shopping.
    • I went to a dollar store and just picked out anything with badly translated English and distributed them as appropriate to pad out numbers. One of them was a tiny plastic chopping board that claimed to be "high tech" and for "professionals". Another was a roll of duct tape. There was also a pack of serviettes that had "serves you right!" in bright colors on the front. Anything that was silly and cheap but would still would see some use.
    • I have a vegan sibling-in-law. A couple of years ago, we were joking about how plant-based chocolate treats for dogs were cheaper than the ones for humans. I think they've safely forgotten about that conversation now so this year I'm going to give them a little treat.
    • I think at one point I just wrapped a big box of packing peanuts with absolutely nothing else inside. I vaguely recall adding some rocks for extra weight in a gift somewhere, might have been that one.

    Some of these would not have been funny at all if my family hadn't already been expecting shenanigans instead of real gifts, so keep your audience in mind!

    The reason we started doing this was because our family stopped getting each other gifts many years ago and everyone enjoyed the lack of stress and being able to focus on quality time. And then my husband and I had a kid, and of course everyone wanted to buy her gifts. But we didn't want her to be the only one with gifts under the tree and develop some kind of weird complex about it, so these playful low-stakes gifts to each other were our solution.

  • This one is probably out of date now with smart TVs and few people using cable, but one of those jumbo TV remotes for people with poor eyesight/motor difficulties.

  • One of those pillows that looks like an inflating phone battery.

    Better idea: 3"*4" Magnetic viewing film, stored in a thoughtfuk card, which is wrapped in a box with 6"*6" thermochromatic film, which is itself is wrapped in a box with a roll of glow in the dark tape, and then given to them with another thoughtful card that holds a gift card to somewhere you think they would like. Basically a nesting set of tiny cool things that all cost about as much as the wrapping paper they are in.

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