My dinner guests bring me unwelcome gifts. How to feed them the truth?

Despite being a chocolate lover, I hate Lindt balls with a passion. Yet whenever I invite guests for dinner, they invariably bring me a box. I’d honestly prefer to receive nothing. Is there any way to politely announce to all my friends that these gifts are unwelcome?
K.M., Bondi, NSW

Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch

I actually don’t mind Lindt balls, even though they sound like something you yank out of your bellybutton when you’re lying on the couch, you’re a bit bored and your T-shirt’s too short. My personal choco-ball dislike is Ferrero Rocher, which I believe is Italian for “Oversweetened, hazelnut-flavoured styrofoam”. If anyone offers me one, I always make my dislike clear by saying, “No thanks”, then miming sticking a finger down my throat and fake-projectile-chundering.

But maybe I’m being too subtle about it because, just like you, I keep getting Ferrero Rocher gift-boxes from friends. Either they forget I don’t like them or they’re unloading their own Ferrero Rocher gift-boxes because they don’t like them, either, and they’ve got a whole Taxibox full of them parked in their driveway. So how are we supposed to deal with unwelcome chocolate gifts in a polite, non-chunder-miming way? It’s probably too late to make an announcement to your friends: they’ll just be racked with retrospective gift-shame, embarrassed about all the times they foisted their cream-filled balls on you.

Sorry to say this to a fellow chocolate lover, but there’s only one way to stop the gifts, and it involves forgoing all public dinner-party chocolate consumption from now on. How about you tell your friends you’re on a strict, no-sugar diet, and I’ll tell my friends I’m allergic to cocoa, hazelnut and Italians. And we’ll just sneak off to the bathroom after dinner with a Caramello Koala hidden in our socks.

[e-mail]

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.