Mother's Day: Why Do We Keep Getting Bad Gifts?

This is a picture of an actual bad gift I recieved on Mother's Day. From my husband, no less. I'll explain later. But first, riddle me this:

Why do schools encourage children to buy their mothers plants for Mother’s Day?!  That’s just another thing we have to take care of. What a bad gift. Let’s just add watering and weeding to our ever growing To Do List. That’s right, pile on some more sh*t in our crazy, stressful, hectic lives.  Whatever happened to chocolates? 

I’ll tell you what gifts I like receiving the best on Mother’s Day:  the homemade, rather, school-made ones your kids give you.  A pasta necklace; a sketch of you and your child together only you’re depicted as bears, a battery powered, sweetly decorated, fake-flickering candle (we’re a society gone safety crazy), these are a few of my favorite things.  Last year my teenage daughter gave me handmade coupons that said One Night Of Your Teenage Daughter Washing Dishes or Your Teenage Daughter Will Cook Dinner Tonight only to find when I tried cashing them in that there was an expiration date on the back! 

For me, nothing tops off Mother’s Day like going out to dinner with your kids:  no cooking and no clean up.  Priceless.  Actually, pretty pricey these days but oh so worth it.  My husband and I recently separated.  We were together for almost 22 years however, we were only parents for 8 of them.  During those tumultuous years, I received many bad Mother’s Day gifts from my husband.  Many was the time I hinted--dare I say flat out told him (he just never listened) that I’d much rather we just go out to dinner only to find some odd trinket on the table instead when I woke up every Mother’s Day morn.

Here is a photo of the oddest bad gift I ever received from him on Mother's Day - a ceramic syrup jug that looked like it had the flu.  I used to think it was my young daughter who was encouraging him to purchase these as they were very ‘kid like’ in nature.  However, her sense of humor at the time may have been infantile but not immature as some of these choices were.  And we’re not talking about a leopard print Snuggie or a Chia Pet we’re talking gross, juvenile nonsense.  There was the year he gave me a scary, skull ceramic bust for the piano....maybe that's how he saw me??  And there was the time he gave me a garden gnome that was bent over mooning passersby - a true garden classic.  That was a real conversation piece in our neighborhood.  I swear, I used to think I was married to the Frank The Tank character played by Will Ferrell in the movie Old School.

What’s the oddest, most memorable, funniest or most distasteful bad gift you ever received on Mother’s Day? And so you go for sublte hints or blatant direction to minimize your chances of getting a bad Mother's Day gift?  Please do share.