I'd rather have a lump of coal...

Every Christmas people save up their money to buy things that will show their loved ones just how much they care. They sneak them into the house to wrap them up, and then they place them under the Christmas tree. On Christmas morning, people tear through wrapping paper to find exactly what they wanted.\nThat's what's supposed to happen, but it doesn't always work out that way.\nMany people have discovered that giving someone a gift doesn't always create the desired effect, and sometimes, people get stuck with things they don't really want. Twenty-one-year-old Bloomington resident C.R. Hoke discovered this truth firsthand when he was in high school. One day, Hoke was at the mall with his girlfriend. The couple eventually made their way to the pet store where Hoke's girlfriend cast her eyes upon a rabbit, and it was love at first sight. Seizing the opportunity to be able to buy his girlfriend a gift he was sure she wanted, Hoke decided to buy the rabbit for her.\n"I bought a cage, the rabbit, everything," Hoke says. "It was over a hundred bucks."\nHoke felt like the boyfriend of the year until he arrived at his girlfriend's house. When the couple arrived with the rabbit, his girlfriend's parents were less than pleased.\n"While my girlfriend and her parents were arguing back and forth, I'm just standing there holding this cage with a rabbit in it," Hoke says. "Then her dad was like 'Why did you do this?'"\nAfter that, Hoke began to get hot and felt like he was going to start sweating. Eventually, the arguing subsided, and it was decided that the rabbit could stay for one night in the garage, but after that, Hoke had to take the rabbit. Hoke attempted to return the rabbit to the pet store, but the pet store wouldn't take the rabbit back.\n"I was with my friend, and he started mouthing off to the guy, but that didn't do any good," Hoke says.\nHaving no other choice, Hoke took the rabbit home.\n"My parents were cool with it," Hoke says. "We let it run around in the backyard."\nUnbeknownst to him, Hoke's mother had just had their lawn treated by ChemLawn.\n"The next day my eight-year-old brother finds the rabbit stiff as a board lying on its side," Hoke says.\nThe rabbit was dead.\n"It broke my little brother's heart," Hoke says.\nGift-givers are not the only victims of bad gift-giving. Gift receivers can be victims, too, as freshman Michelle Hoover found out at a young age. Every year, about 25 or 30 of her family members would get together for Christmas, Hoover says.\n"I was about seven or eight years old, and I had just started wearing training bras," Hoover says. "My godmother asked my mom what she should get me for Christmas."\nOn Christmas morning, everyone was in the family room watching the children open their gifts. Hoover opened her godmother's gift and found a matching training bra and underwear.\n"I about crapped myself," Hoover says. "I was so embarrassed."\nThe kids had to hold up what they got so the adults could take pictures Hoover says.\n"I had to hold it up against my body and let them take pictures of me," Hoover says. "You have no idea how embarrassing it is when you first start wearing a bra to have it displayed to my entire family."\nBad gift-givers should remember that what goes around, comes around. Sophomore Griffin Lock and the rest of his family have been reminded of this every Christmas now for the decade. It all started when Lock's uncle asked his grandpa for turtleneck sweaters for Christmas.\n"My grandpa, an older man and not really with modern society, responded by giving my uncle a box containing about 10 dickeys," Lock says.\nDickeys are the neck part of a turtleneck and nothing else, Lock says.\n"Of course, my family, who gets off on comedic situations, lost it," Lock says.\nLock says the next year, his uncle decided to fight back. One year later, Lock's dad opened his Christmas present from his uncle.\n"There, to his surprise, was a red dickey from the gift package a year before, laughing him in the face," Lock says.\nLock's dad was not the kind of person to be one-upped and responded in kind by giving Lock's uncle a shirt the next year, but inside was the red dickey.\n"Every year since then, on Christmas, the dickey is passed back and forth between my dad and my uncle as a reminder of how horrible that was," Lock says.\nUnconventional gift-giving rules can help ensure that people get what they really want. Senior Christopher Meadows and a group of several friends decided one Christmas that all the gifts they gave to each other had to come from College Adult Books.\n"Among the gifts purchased were fuzzy pink handcuffs, edible body paint that caused the skin to tingle, erotic dice, magnum condoms and a plastic sheep," Meadows says.\nAnother stipulation for this particular gift-giving experience, Meadows says, was that all gifts must be used.\n"'Far as I know, everyone kept their words," he says.\nWaiting to find out what you're getting for Christmas can also set you up for unpleasant surprises. Freshman Jessica Quillen's sister found this out the hard way.\n"My family always bothers each other about what they're getting from everyone," Quillen says.\nSo one year when Quillen's sister asked what she was getting for Christmas, Quillen told her she was getting a box of rocks.\n"She didn't believe me, and she kept asking, and I kept telling her, 'a box of rocks,'" Quillen says.\nOn Christmas, when Quillen's sister opened a box filled with rocks, she found out that Quillen wasn't lying.\n"So finally, when she opened it up, she realized I was telling her the truth, until she saw the ring box, of course," Quillen says, referring to her actual gift of jewelry.\nThis holiday season will bring countless other gift-giving mishaps, but if you shy away from live animals and matching undergarments, you can greatly reduce your chance of acquiring a gift-giving horror story.