I'm a vegan. My relatives know this. But they seem to be unaware of what a vegan actually is. So I keep getting FUCKING MILK CHOCOLATES!!! Bastards!

My uncle, aunt and little cousins are considerably richer than my own immediate family, and they normally get me some HMV vouchers, or sometimes something mundane but at least tasteful like picture frames, which is just fine by me. Last Winter Presents Day (we're atheists in my family, so we celebrate that instead of Christmas) they, to my surprise, instead got me some milk chocolate (grrrrrrr!) truffles and a pen. A FUCKING PEN!!! What the FUCK kind of a present is that?! Grrrr!
It was actually quite a woo pen, but still, it couldn't've been more than a fiver.

My paternal granny seems to have no idea what age my brothers and I are. One of my brothers has Down's Syndrome and as such severe learning difficulties, so you wouldn't be expected to give him stuff for a normal 16 year-old. But my granny keeps giving him stuff for 3 year-olds. Good thing his learning difficulties are too severe for him to give a shit. I get really random things that aren't crap per se but aren't what I want at all. The latest was a gold locket. I'm not the sort of person who'd be seen dead with a locket. The year before was a round box too little to actually store anything in, with a twinkly plastic-resin snowman on top. That was actually pretty shit. And she keeps giving my dad videos for kids, like Snow White. In her house her husband is the only person allowed to even breathe on the VCR, and she seems to think the same is true of my dad in our house (it isn't; even my Down's Syndrome brother has his own VCR), so gives the videos to him so he can look after them. She is well-meaning, but just mad. Every time I go round to her house I have to keep reminding her that I don't eat milk, butter, fish, etc.

In my immediate family we do have a tradition of giving each other stupid presents in addition to the nice ones, but we say the silly presents are from the animals (the cats, the chicken, etc.). One year I gave my dad a box of drawing pins (30p from the duka) saying they were from my rat.
( Bob Todd whee, Fri 24 Sep 2004, 15:21, Reply)