Every Year, My Aunt and I Compete to See Who Can Give the Worst Gift. Just When I Thought I Had Her, Everything Changed.

The gift arrived early, as it did every year, in a plain brown box. For weeks, it winked at me from beneath our fake plastic Christmas tree, an aura of mischief seeming to radiate from within. It looked odd nestled among the brighter, more festively adorned presents, a deceptively simple package I knew to contain a mysterious armament of war.

Christmas morning kicked off with the usual fanfare, each of us tearing into the crisp tissue paper and slick raffia ribbons. Battered bags and bows settled around us. Soon, the mysterious plain package was the only gift left. Just like every year, we opened it last. Mostly out of fear.

With a gulp and a knowing look, my mom passed it over to me. I held it in my lap, letting my fingers trace the return address in the upper left. “Ruby and Bill,” it read. “Chicago.”

Competing pulses of excitement and dread surged through me. The year before, Aunt Ruby had sent me a rock adorned with a single, hot-glued earring and the words “Justin Bieber ate my ass.” The year before that, she gave my 8-year-old stepsister a black block of wood with “coal” written on it—and nothing else. It fractured my family for decades.

Steeling myself, I sliced the box open and reached inside. Buttery-soft fabric met my fingertips. I grabbed a handful and pulled it skyward, revealing a heap of black satin and lace. Was it a dress? A tablecloth? I gave it the side-eye. What was she up to this time?

Slowly, I began to unfold the fabric. Then I unfolded it again … and again. The thing was huge—whatever it was, it was not meant to fit my 13-year-old body.

I held it up for my family to see.

My mom gasped. My stepdad swallowed a laugh. My stepsister covered her eyes and shrieked. “Why is this happening again?” she moaned, hugging her knees. She was still salty about last year’s coal.

In my hands was a sizzling hot negligee set, size XXL. Sensual lace cascaded across its well-padded bra, each cup easily the size of my head. A pair of suggestive garters smirked sheepishly from below, while a heart-shaped enclosure near the bust beckoned with gleaming false diamonds. It looked like the kind of thing a mature woman might wear on a post-divorce whim, blushing on her OkCupid date with a retired golfer in Palm Beach, Florida.

A smile spread across my face. Ruby had won this year, fair and square.

For the past 20 years, Aunt Ruby and I have been engaged in a ruthless battle over who can give the worst gift. We’ve never formalized the competition or written down rules of engagement—we just know, in an unspoken and resolute way, that come Christmas, one of us is getting destroyed.

When I was 15, I ended her with a demented panorama of a crime scene using miniature dolls, which I crudely hot-glued to a chunk of wood I found in my garage. The crime in question was a bloody, seasonally apropos crucifixion, but I littered the scene with other, less-biblical casualties that I circled with chalk. Crime scene, do not cross! For scenery, I affixed a ratty pine twig next to a fallen figurine and called it a day. It cost zero dollars.

Ruby was speechless. The gift made no sense. She had no interest in crime, no relationship to crucifixion, and it wasn’t the result of an inside joke. It was nothing more than a grievously random object, one that would make most people say, “What is wrong with her?” or just, “Why?” In other words, it was perfect.

She got me back the next year with a big, pointless bag of sticks and a discarded suede miniskirt my uncle Bill found outside. A few years later, I hit her with a T-shirt that read, “I can smell your wiener from here.” When I was 22, she won handily with a faux children’s book titled The Little Penis: A Finger Puppet Parody Book. Inside limply lay, well, a penis finger puppet, its head embroidered with a sickly, weirdly satisfied smile. If that makes little sense to you, know that I come from a family in which we routinely lie in the street and pretend to be dead, just for fun.

You might be wondering what the rules of this game are. There are none. To play Worst Gift, all you have to do is turn off your brain. You have to imagine its pink, undulating curves unfurling into something smoother and more reptilian, its drive toward logic melting away like candle wax. The trick is to think of your opponent, let your mind go blank, welcome chaos into your heart, and send them whatever item first comes to mind. With luck, it’s not going to be something the receiver will use, wear, or display with pride—it’s going to be something they stare at, shake their head, and then possibly throw away. That’s how you know you’ve won.

The game started organically when I was 10 or 11. Much of it had to do with my uncle Bill, who worked at a carwash for 30 years. Every day, he’d bring home little piles of forgotten detritus that people cleaned out of their cars, presenting them like prized trophies to Ruby, who delighted at her husband’s demented ability to hunt and gather. There were rosaries, Pez dispensers, dolls, paintings, clothing, furniture, children’s toys, fake plants, lamps, dishes, every type of jewelry you can imagine. Ruby and Bill called them “carwash treasures,” and they proudly displayed them around their house. Eventually, they accumulated so many that their home became a Museum of Other People’s Stuff, with each room, hall, nook, and cranny taking on a specific theme. One bedroom is blanketed entirely in Beatles memorabilia. Another is plastered in hundreds of tiny crucifixes. In the corner, there’s a bookcase dedicated to the motif of shoes, feet, and hands.

Ruby often harvests treasures from her house for Worst Gift. One year, she dug through her overflowing T-shirt collection and found a tiny tank top that said “#1 Bitch.” I can’t even fit it over my head.

But as much as Worst Gift made us laugh, it also meant something more. Ruby and Bill never had much money, and although they were generous when they could be, gifts were never about lavishing their loved ones. Rather, they were about sensing a facet of their personality, then embodying it with a (usually free) item that wordlessly reflected it back to them. It was a way of seeing them, of showing that they knew them well enough to activate the precise knobs and levers of their amusement. How did Ruby know I’d love a billowing negligee that it would take me several decades—and several alterations to my genetic code—to grow into? Because she saw that I was 13 and wallowing in the throes of puberty. I didn’t need a Christmas present—I needed to laugh at myself. That was the gift, not the thing itself.

Bill passed away in August this year, dampening Ruby’s enthusiasm for the holidays. She was never a Christmas person—she celebrates “Solstice” to commemorate the shortest day of the year—but being alone for the first December in five decades changed something in her. Festivities had lost their appeal. She didn’t want to sign her holiday cards with just one name.

“I’m done with Christmas,” she declared during a recent visit I made to her house. “I’m not doing it anymore. That’s it.”

Her eyes fell on the little shrine she made for Bill’s ashes, which sits at the foot of her bed, illuminated by an ever-flickering electric candle. It’s covered in treasures—a necklace he found for her, a hummingbird figurine, a Barbie-sized hair dryer, a tiny sculpture of an old lady with no arms or legs (which he inexplicably asked to be laid to rest with). To anyone else, they look like junk-drawer discards with no practical use or meaning. But to them, each item was a gift, a tiny, wordless sentence conveyed in a language only they spoke. I knew you’d like it. I know because I love you.

Selfishly, I want Worst Gift to live forever. It allowed Ruby and me to be funny together, and to dance around the culture of expensive, serious, and obligatory gifts that consumes much of Christmas. To win, I had to constantly search for everyday objects that would make her laugh, which caused me to spend much of the year considering what in my environment was most preposterous. I liked that mindset. It made everything seem weird.

Sometimes I wonder if Ruby was doing the same thing when she picked out gifts for me. I imagine her lighting up when she finds the right treasure, cackling to herself when she pictures my stupefied reaction. You give someone a pair of socks when you don’t know what else to get them, but you give them an oversized lingerie set meant for a very large, demure adult woman when you know exactly who they are.

I’m hoping this year is just a temporary truce. I got her a vacuum. She sent me something. I haven’t opened it yet.