I proposed to my wife at Christmas by putting the ring in a bigger box so she was surprised. It was a box for skincare product, and she was actually excited for it before she even opened it to see the ring. Obviously she was happy for the proposal, but she also seemed a little disappointed she didn’t get skincare stuff.

The following Christmas, I got her a tiny container of a skincare product she liked and put it in a ring box.

Alcohol

Me and my extended family have begun a tradition of giving each other silly joke gifts instead of serious ones.

• My father in law doesn’t drink alcohol so I got him “alcohol-free” beer. It was just an empty beer bottle. Technically alcohol-free!
• a couple of days before Christmas, my husband came back from doing the grocery shopping. I stole most of the non-perishable items when he wasn’t looking, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He thought I was a mind reader and gotten him exactly what he was planning to buy for himself until he saw them all together and realized it was his own shopping.
• I went to a dollar store and just picked out anything with badly translated English and distributed them as appropriate to pad out numbers. One of them was a tiny plastic chopping board that claimed to be “high tech” and for “professionals”. Another was a roll of duct tape. There was also a pack of serviettes that had “serves you right!” in bright colors on the front. Anything that was silly and cheap but would still would see some use.
• I have a vegan sibling-in-law. A couple of years ago, we were joking about how plant-based chocolate treats for dogs were cheaper than the ones for humans. I think they’ve safely forgotten about that conversation now so this year I’m going to give them a little treat.
• I think at one point I just wrapped a big box of packing peanuts with absolutely nothing else inside. I vaguely recall adding some rocks for extra weight in a gift somewhere, might have been that one.

Some of these would not have been funny at all if my family hadn’t already been expecting shenanigans instead of real gifts, so keep your audience in mind!

The reason we started doing this was because our family stopped getting each other gifts many years ago and everyone enjoyed the lack of stress and being able to focus on quality time. And then my husband and I had a kid, and of course everyone wanted to buy her gifts. But we didn’t want her to be the only one with gifts under the tree and develop some kind of weird complex about it, so these playful low-stakes gifts to each other were our solution.

“SO”? Sorry, I have problems that almost any possible sentence have his own unique acronym in english.

The very largest potato you can find.

As a grandmom, my Mom has decided on boxes for really lame gifts that might make you wonder if she has dementia, for gift cards.

If you don’t give her sufficient ideas for her to buy you something you enjoy, you’re a Scrooge and deserve this box of instant jello …… containing a gift card so you can get it yourself

Boxes within boxes with different recipients. You hand the gift to the first recipient, who unwraps a plain cardboard box, opens it, and finds a gift wrapped with a bow and a new recipient. The gift is handed to the next recipient who repeats the process, and the gift moves on. The final tiny box is a dollar store magnet. The first box was the size of a refrigerator. Everyone gets a present.

I once received a 20kg salami. Quite the surprise and very memorable. It’s a fermented product, so stores well.

My dad was going grey, so my brother bought him ‘just for men’ hair dye, which he opened at the Christmas dinner table with the entire family. He was about 9. We still laugh about it.

My sister once put some dog doo in a paper towel tube and wrapped it as a present.

But somehow I don’t think that the kind of prank you’re looking for.

Helped my dad wrap a box in about an inch of duct tape (which was then gift wrapped) for a cousin’s Christmas present. The box was full of packing peanuts and had a false bottom with a gift card underneath. At no point had we stopped to consider whether or not it could be opened again (it took a long time to get it open lol).

Depending on the audience, there are cute little plush things, Giant Microbes, which have a line of sexual transmitted diseases. If you get one for an SO, they can say, “13esq gave me chlamydia for Christmas…”

Other good joke gifts can come from any inside joke that you may have with your SO, so these are very situational. At one point, I had joked that my SO was a sugar mama because she was paying for something expensive for us. I later got her a t-shirt for a candy called Sugar Mama.

On one date, we were the only ones dining at an outside patio at a nicer Italian restaurant. We had ordered wood fire pizzas. Anyway, a very large rat came to visit the patio, and we had joked about it at the time, even naming the rat. I later gave her an ornament of a felt rat holding a pizza slice (which is apparently a thing).

I can’t think of any others right now, but I love giving little joke gifts to people along with real ones.

20 lbs of foot long nails.

Could go with a box full of spring loaded snakes.

One of those pillows that looks like an inflating phone battery.

Better idea: 3"*4" Magnetic viewing film, stored in a thoughtfuk card, which is wrapped in a box with 6"*6" thermochromatic film, which is itself is wrapped in a box with a roll of glow in the dark tape, and then given to them with another thoughtful card that holds a gift card to somewhere you think they would like. Basically a nesting set of tiny cool things that all cost about as much as the wrapping paper they are in.

I’ve given my SO leaves, rocks, and sticks like a bird making a nest. It makes her chuckle. We have a strange relationship.