I haven’t done a contest in a while. And hey, it’s Christmastime. So let’s do a contest. I’ll give away the following:

1) Copy of Karma Girl and T-shirt

2) Copy of Hot Mama and T-shirt

3) Copy of Jinx

How to enter: Just leave a comment on this post telling me about the worst or best Christmas/Hanukkah/birthday/other present you’ve ever gotten. I’ll draw the winners on Wednesday and announce them on the blog.

So what’s the worst Christmas present I’ve ever received? An olive tray.

Yes, Virginia, there are things called olive trays. You use them to serve olives at parties. They are long, skinny dishes, just wide enough for olives and nothing else. It still boggles my mind that someone, somewhere, decided to create a dish just to serve olives — and that I ended up with one of them.

Why was this a bad present? For starters, I hate olives. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. I can’t stress that enough. The tray itself was fairly harmless, sturdy white ceramic. The only problem was that it was an olive tray — which meant you could only put olives in it and nothing else. It wasn’t even wide enough to put Hershey kisses in, unless I lined them up just so.

Of course, the person who gave me this had no idea that I didn’t like olives, which is why she also gave me a jar of olives to serve in the tray. Sigh. You know it’s a bad present when you tear the paper off the box and start hoping that it’s really an umbrella inside.

So what happened to the olive tray? Well, every year at my newspaper, we gather up all the items people have sent us (we can’t accept freebies), hold a silent auction for the newspaper staff to bid on whatever they want, and donate the money raised to our Santa Pal charity. The olive tray got donated to the cause. And someone at the newspaper actually bought it. I don’t know who or for how much, but it went home with someone that year.

Still, I think about the tray every Christmas — and how people reacted to it. My boss at the newspaper was practically crying with laughter when I brought the olive tray in for the action and told her that I’d gotten it for Christmas. Several folks looked at me and said “Um, that’s different,” in strained voices. Other people looked at me like I was making up the whole story — like I’d actually bought the tray for myself. Sigh.

What about you guys? What’s the worst present you’ve ever gotten? Share in the comments for a chance to win. Or just to vent. 😎