by Sam E. Jones

Created on: October 31, 2010

It’s a sad Christmas indeed when you spend like a million hours running around trying to get everyone you care about a gift they will like, and then find that few of them put much thought into the gift they got for you, and so you wind up with a bunch of junk you don’t like so much that you want to get rid of it, in reasonable ways though, of course. What’s the best way?

Well, one of the newer and more popular options is to grab your digital camera (always a good gift) and snap some pictures of each item, and then put them up for sale on eBay. While this might seem crass to some, to others it might seem like the option that makes the most sense, because seriously if whoever bought you that awful jumbo toaster or granny housedress happens to stumble across your ad, and is a little peeved at you for doing so, does it really matter? The whole idea of gift giving is to please the person you give it to, right? So if you don’t, but you do wind up pleased with the cash you get for it, then, isn’t that a reasonable thing to do?

Certainly it’s better than re-gifting, another popular way to get rid of unwanted gifts. Unfortunately, the possibility of getting busted is disturbingly high, especially if you happen to have a rather small circle of friends, relatives and acquaintances. On the other hand, the payoff is potentially higher, since re-gifting means not having to shop for someone on your list the next time around, which might mean saving just a little bit of your sanity; no small thing. So, yeah, re-gifting is always an option.

Once you get past the top two options, the choices start to dwindle rather quickly. Some people simply pack away unwanted stuff in the attic or basement. Others give away stuff to friends not as a gift, but just because, while others still, pile it all into boxes and cart it over to the nearest Goodwill store. The advantage of these options is that you run little risk of offending the person that gave you the lousy gift in the first place, though, that may not be as high on your list seeing as how they somehow managed to give you a lousy gift even though you are such an open book that even a moron could find something you’d like with little more than a few minutes thought.

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