Do you like your family telling you what to get them for presents?

denni70

I get this all the time so i end up buying these really nice gifts and we all get crap pressies back and nothing what we want!! Yes i know it's the thought that counts and all that.....but sooooo annoying! I guess i am not brave or cheeky enough to say my son wants that and it's £20, plus it kind of takes away what gifts are about. cx

oystercatcher

I'd just be honest. Say 'We're having an economy christmas this year is there something small you would like ? If not I will just use my judgement!'

Or if you've been asked for something specific just say , Sorry the budget doesn't stretch very far this year !

I have the opposite problem with my family in that I ask what they would like and they just ask for a £5 DVD when I want to spend £50 or so .... and no we've never gone in for the matching prices of presents we just buy according to what we feel we can afford.
Even when I was a child I can remember being told, well before Christmas that Nanna had just moved and would buy us an extra present some other time as she was short of money, of course we never did get the extra present but it didn't matter.

I think it is really silly when people get into debt over Christmas, it's just two days for goodness sake !

jenhug

Its damn rude to tell someone what you expect to be bought!
My family will ask us to provide a gift list, which we do as it makes life easier, but I would never choose an expensive item to go on the list. All the family get to see the list and they choose what they want to buy (if anything)

gill_81uk

My inlaws have started to this the last few years as well and it drives me mad!

We have always been a 'list family' where we make a list of things we would like and then get ideas for each other of them, which has always worked very well. These items are usually relatively cheap things like cds and dvds.

However the inlaws somehow started to come up with expensive things between them that they would like money towards. One year it was a tv, another year a tv cabinet and for FIL recently it was an ipod. They tell us and BIL to give what we can afford towards it, which I always find a bit embarrassing as we can't afford as much as BIL can (good job, single, lives at home) and we don't spend that much on my parents. The DH always wants to get them a small gift each to wrap up so that they have something to open on the day....which will quite often end up being a similar value to my parents actual present!

Every year I vow we're just going to tell them we've already got something sorted but he somehow still gets sucked into it!

What makes it worse is that they never ask what we want, and then MIL will brag about all the 3 4 2 presents she got in Sainsburys which generally have very little thought put into them and more often than not don't get used!

Primrose

Maybe you just have to bite the bullet on this one and tell them that now we're all in a recession and you are being affected financially, you're changing the way you deal with presents. Tell them that in the past you have felt financially embarrassed by being asked for gifts that you can't afford to buy and that in future, presents are going to have to come out of your affordable budget. There's little point in you getting annoyed about their behaviour because by continuing to go along with it, you're merely condoning it. Why not suggest that everybody sticks to a £X per person limit in future to avoid financial pressure being imposed on people at a difficult time. Tell her it's what all your friends are doing these days and if she isn't happy with that arrangement, you'll be happy to give her a voucher to the same value so that she can use it towards something she does want. You can still stick that in a little fancy box and gift wrap it.

brighthair

I give a list to my Mum. Which reads a bit like this
DKNY perfume, in purple tall bottle, x price, in Boots, left hand side as you walk in
Topshop top, size, code, on back wall of shop

otherwise if I just wrote perfume, I'd get nothing! I do write a massive list of varying price stuff. Also Christmas tradition is that my stocking is filled with useful stuff - shampoo, conditioner, nail file, make up brushes - sounds boring but SO good when I was a student

For my parents, I ask Dad what Mum wants and vice versa

grastgirl

It is rude to buy your own present and then ask someone else to pay for it, and also to dictate to you what you will buy. I suspect the rest of the family have picked up MIL tactlessness/commercialness. I have an amazon list for Christmas and birthday as they're both in December for me. I always make it longer than it needs to be with a wide range of prices, then they can pick what they want to but, makes coordinating who's buying what a lot easier for the family. Now extending it to my OH, because they never know what to get him at all.

sooz

elastigirl wrote: »

Last year my mil bought her own bday present from us and just told us to give her the money she didn't even give it us to wrap. I was fumming.

wow - she really has a cheek.

take a look at oxfam unwrapped. I'd buy her something from there..she gets a nice fridge magnet saying you thought of her and bought a loo/goat/hygiene kit , & someone deserving gets what they need

tori.k

Sometimes you have just got to grow a thick skin, it didnt go down well with few of our family when i knocked Christmas for adults on the head and put a price tag on the kids, but i kept telling them i wasn't doing debt for christmas anymore, felt rotten the first year as some people ignore my request and gave me gifts and a few had a moan behind my back, but from then on its been fine, in fact other's soon followed the idea, and christmas has been alot less hassle for everybody.
As for older people i know your MIL been very rude, but as my nan stated years ago you get to the point where " i dont want the house filled with cr*p anymore" she did get 13 pairs of slippers that year...lol tho she never asked for expensive things mostly nice food stuff and things she needed. im getting to the same stage myself...

bonty44

oystercatcher wrote: »

I'd just be honest. Say 'We're having an economy christmas this year is there something small you would like ? If not I will just use my judgement!'

Brilliant, spot on, I'll be using this a lot this year. :T