How to Recycle a Gift

So you there you are, in your wrapping-paper-strewn wreck of a living room on Christmas morning, slouched in an armchair and staring groggy-eyed at the most hideous gift anyone has ever given to you in your entire life. Is it a vase? A serving bowl? A moisture trap for the humidifier? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because after you’ve effusively thanked your Aunt Edna you’re going to carefully wrap it back up and unload it on the next luckless recipient who crosses your path. Here’s how to go about it.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Restore the gift to its original condition. With any luck, you had a bad feeling about this present even before you opened it, so you didn’t tear the wrapping paper to shreds in anticipatory glee. Check to see that the price tag has been removed (yes, most gift-givers are intelligent enough to take care of this beforehand, but then again, most gift-givers are also intelligent enough not to give gifts that look like they’ve been stolen from the set of “Battlestar Galactica”) and carefully rewrap the whatever-it-is.
2. Affix a sticky note to the rewrapped gift, listing a) what it is (to the best of your knowledge) and b) who gave it to you. Remember, you may not be regifting this abomination for months, and you don’t want to go through the unpleasant experience of having to open it again—or, even worse, accidentally giving it back to the person who gave it to you in the first place. Then stash it in a closet somewhere well out of sight.
3. Now comes the tricky part: deciding who gets the gift. Remember, unless your intended recipient has hopelessly bad taste, he or she will come to think about you the way you think about your Aunt Edna. Therefore, it’s best to unload that hopelessly tacky thingamajig on someone you barely know: the ideal situation would be (say) if your old college roommate, who you haven’t seen in 20 years, invites you to her daughter’s engagement party.
4. Repeat as necessary. What goes around, comes around, so don’t be surprised if that gift you regifted is gifted back to you five or ten years down the road (and, for all you know, you weren’t even the first person to receive it in the first place—some especially ugly gifts have been circulating since the 18th century). If you are unlucky enough to receive the same gift twice, do the rest of the world a favor and bury it deep in the backyard.