re-gifting

I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who coined the term 'regifting'. I'm sure you're all familiar with the phenomenon but for those of you pretending not to know then here's a definition for you.

Pre-babies I would never have regifted. I recieved all kinds of unwanted gifts at the end of every school year when the children in the class would leave beautifully wrapped, carefully chosen, discount store candles on my desk. Millions of them. There was always the exception and I did recieve some beautiful, thoughtful gifts but generally candles were the gift of choice. I would carefully carry them all home and store them away. Eventually I'd use the nicest, donate others and lose the truly hideous ones. I never regifted.

Then... I had a baby. The sheer quantity of gifts that our first born recieved meant it was truly physically impossible for her to wear every item of clothing she was given. The occasional item was still hanging on it's tiny little hanger with tags still attached long after she'd outgrown it. Sooooo, I have, I confess, very carefully re-gifted one or two items.

There's careful etiquette to re-gifting. The most important rule of them all... REMEMBER WHO GAVE YOU THE GIFT! I'm a tentative re-gifter so I haven't broken this golden rule yet. However when I sat down to write this post I typed "regift" into google and there are websites and blogs dedicated to the topic with tips and tricks and funny stories of re-gifting gone wrong. Very entertaining!

Anyhoo...the reason I bring it all up is that the wee man recently turned 1! Happy Birthday Wee Man! He recieved many many fantastic gifts. One or two however were doubles of other gifts and a couple didn't work or were discovered broken when we unwrapped and assembled. I hesitated to return the gifts to the givers because 're-gifting' crossed my mind. I asked one friend if she had the reciept for a faulty gift and she very promptly appeared at my door with a brand new identical gift. It hadn't occurred to me that this might happen otherwise I never would have mentioned the gift wasn't working and I would have had super-duper engineer hubby dismantle it and do his magic?! She explained that she didn't have a receipt but happened to have an identical (brand-new, in it's box) toy at home so she thought she'd drop it by. I was mortified and confused at the same time. Mortified that I'd caused her to give us 2 gifts and confused that gift #2 happened to be hanging round the house. Have I deprived some other birthday boy of his present this month?

To add to my guilt...

We opened the new new gift and spent a few days enjoying it muchly. The defunct version sat right next to this keyboard until I picked it up to move it aside the other day and got the fright of my life when it ROARED at me! Yes...after a few days R&R it works! I can't tell gift giving friend and so I've despatched original dino to Grandma's house where it roared happily for a day or two but when we went to visit him today he had skulked back into retirement.

So...a new warning to add to my re-gifting rules. What if the person gives it back or asks where you got it so they can return it...and you don't know?!

My tip is to only re-gift overseas. You'll never know what they did with the gift and they can happily do with it what they choose, including pass it along to some other poor sod!