I’m not sure if any other families did this, but would not be surprised if this was uniquely us.

As we got closer to Christmas, our parents would start threatening us: “If you don’t fix your nasty ways, Santa will bring you a rotten potato for Christmas.”

As threats go, it only held potency in the month or so before Christmas.

Only once did the looming threat become real.

My sister, then about four or five, and an absolute paragon of virtue and cuteness, had a bad run up to Christmas, and on Christmas morning, there, beside the bed where Santa used to leave the main prezzy, was a truly skunky spud.

It was oozing.

The potatoe had clods of mud stuck to it and long pale sprouting tendrils all round it and it stunk.

In hindsight, I reckon Mum or Dad must’ve been saving this delight up since June.

Her howls could be heard in adjacent postcodes.

My brother and I thought it was the funniest thing to have ever happened in the history of funny-ness.

We were old enough to have worked out The Secret of Santa and therefore had some basic idea of just how premeditated, callous and cruel this was and that it was thereof funny because it wasn’t happening to the two of us.

I recall it took ages for the deep, wracking sobs to stop and for her to realise the real prezzy was in the loungeroom.

Our family used to laugh about it every year … until we started having kids of our own and realised how shockingly awful it had really been.

People can be really odd in gift-giving.

For example, people who know me know that I rely on just one functioning eye.

The other one is on permanent leave.

I’m a bit like that gag: My girlfriend has eyes like pools – football pools: one at home and the other away.

But I vividly recall my Nana one year giving me a plastic stereoscopic slide viewer as a gift.

Years later someone gave me one of those blasted 3D pattern books which used to be popular.

(Warning: never drag me into a 3D movie. While everyone else is oohing and ahhing, I’ll be sitting there wondering what just happened.)

One of the best/worst Christmas gifts I’ve heard of was a $2 coin in an envelope with a note: “I brought you $30 worth of Scratchie cards. I scratched them for you and you won $2.”

Someone I know was once given a brown string shopping bag for Christmas. Nicely wrapped.

And I still don’t understand why one Christmas a relative gave me a DVD of half naked American people sitting back in a hot-tub.

It’s safely stored along with the plastic penguin, the plastic globe of the Earth that can dispense wine, a small figure of David Boon which hurls insults at the English when you push a button and a brass bottle opener with the polished end of a cow horn attached to it.

Oh, and the 1987 edition of the Melways streetmaps of Melbourne.

That was the year I moved to Bendigo.

I’m not saying who, but someone is going to get the CD of Justin Beiber’s 2010 greatest hits this year.

WAYNE GREGSON