Six regifting tips to ensure you don’t get caught

REGIFTING isn’t tight, it’s a legitimate thing in our consumer-conscious world, writes Kerry Parnell. But you still don’t want to be caught doing it.

IT’S Christmas Eve and you’ve forgotten to buy some distant relative a present?

No matter — just visit your regifting drawer and select something suitable to wrap up. It’s not tight — it’s a thing now in our consumer-conscious world. There’s an official Regifting Day and website regiftable.com and everything.

So, permission granted, before you present your cousin with that lavender hand cream that she gave you last year, here’s how to regift and get away with it:

1. Remember who gave you the present

There’s nothing wrong with paying it forward with someone else’s generosity, just make sure you don’t give the item back to them.

Like my grandmother did to my mum, the year she opened her Christmas present to find a top and pair of slippers she’d given Nanna for her birthday that year and a box of writing paper she’d gifted her for Mother’s Day. Just to underline the point.

2. Check the sell-by date

If the item is perishable, don’t hoard it; eat it or give it to someone who will enjoy it.

Which is what one relative probably thought she was doing when she presented me with a basket of biscuits and chocolates I’d given her the year before. Except they’d all gone off.

Even Santa endorses regifting. (Pic: iStock)

3. Look up the price

If you received something you don’t like, Google how much it costs before wrapping it up again. After all, you don’t want them to think you are mean, do you?

And conversely, you don’t want to look like Gina Rinehart by accidentally giving them a ridiculously lavish present. So don’t put a Jo Malone candle in your Kris Kringle, for example, like a friend of mine accidentally did and now her colleagues think she’s a secret mining magnate.

4. Make sure you haven’t used it

Regifting does not include items from your home you no longer want, no matter how pricey they were in the first place.

An acquaintance was delighted to receive a jacket from her sister — until she discovered biscuit crumbs and a used tissue in the pocket.

Another colleague received a massage manual from a charity shop — complete with oil stains from slippery-fingered strangers.

Please check use-by dates before regifting edibles... food hampers from 1999 should probably go in the bin.

But the prize still goes to my grandmother (she was a special lady) who wrapped up her husband’s half-used shower gel for my brother-in-law. Her husband didn’t need it anymore you see, as he’d died a few months before.

To be honest, Christmas got a whole lot less entertaining after she followed him through the Pearly Gates.

5. Do not re-send Christmas cards

There are some things that really can’t be regifted, and these include Christmas cards. Sorry Nana, but all those years you cut off the backs of cards people had sent you and fashioned them into a kind of festive postcard, were not really getting into the spirit.

6. Check the label

Make sure the item does not have a gift tag or inscription in it, like a friend of mine discovered when her child excitedly unwrapped a Christmas annual — only to discover a heartfelt message from someone else to the gift giver in the flyleaf — and as a final flourish, all the puzzles filled in.

Merry Christmas.