The ugly Christmas shirt held a message it took me years to understand

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/21/ugly-christmas-shirt-message-years-understand

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Call me perverse – or just plain ungrateful – but the present I remember most was the one I liked the least. Like most of us, I’ve been lucky enough to be on the right end of some tremendous presents, as well as on the wrong end of some fairly indifferent stuff. I’ve been overwhelmed with both generosity and futility. Once even at the same time.

Related: The gift: a glove puppet that bore witness to half a century of Christmas love | Philip Hoare

For my 21st birthday in 1977 my parents gave me £300. It turned out they had been squirrelling away a small amount of cash each month for 21 years, with the idea of giving me enough money on my birthday to buy a new car. A sports car, they hoped. It was barely enough to keep my existing beaten-up old Mini on the road.

I’d never had high expectations of one particular uncle. We’d never liked each other much and his Christmas presents had always been perfunctory. A tie that never got worn; a leatherette wallet that never got used. That kind of thing.

One year when I was in my early 20s, this uncle surpassed himself. I knew what it was long before I had opened it. It’s hard to disguise the sound and shape of a shirt in its cellophane wrapper. What I hadn’t banked on was just how hideous the shirt would be. It had clearly been bought from one of those menswear shops that used to exist in almost every market town in the late 1970s and specialised in selling clobber that was always at least three years out of date. It had also spent far too long in the shop window, as the cellophane had turned brown from direct sunlight.

The message was clear. This was the shirt that absolutely no one wanted; not even the least fashion-conscious small-town Rotarian. It wasn’t hard to see why. The shirt came in one of the more hideous shades of brown, relieved only by narrow stripes in an even nastier shade of brown. I was spared the necessity of going through the motions of putting it on by checking the label. It was a medium, I was a large.

The family consensus was that it was the worst Christmas present any of us had ever received

Even my parents were shocked by it. Normally they were inclined to be well-disposed to even the most inappropriate presents. My mother somehow once managed to look enthusiastic when I gave her a bottle of hair lacquer; it was the first time I had been handed cash to buy presents on my own and all I knew about hair lacquer was that it was in my price range and came in the section of the chemist marked “Gifts for Her”. My father would pronounce every present he didn’t like to be “very useful”.

“It really isn’t very nice, is it?” my father said of the shirt. “It’s hideous,” my mother blurted out, upping the ante. The family consensus was that it was the worst Christmas present any of us had ever received. It went straight into the collection for the next parish jumble sale. It’s probably still doing the rounds of Wiltshire jumble sales some 35 years later.

For years the shirt gnawed away at me. It still does, though the shirt and I have now reached an understanding. Or rather, I came to understand the shirt. It hadn’t been an act of extreme thoughtlessness. You don’t buy a wrong-sized sludge-brown shirt in a sunburnt wrapper by mistake. It had been an act of calculated passive aggression that came with the coded message: “You are a typically self-centred young man who thinks he knows best and is wrecking his life, and I really don’t like you at all.”

I never thanked the uncle for the shirt, and he never gave me another present. On the few occasions we’ve met since – weddings and funerals – we’ve barely spoken. And yet it’s as though we’ve been engaged in an unspoken dialogue ever since. It took me a while to work it out, but my uncle had been right all along.

Throughout my 20s I had been a self-centred young man who thought he knew best, and if I had taken on board the message my uncle had sent me I might have saved myself some grief. As it was, I had to cause my family a great deal of pain and lose a great many friendships – and nearly my life – before I came to realise I disliked myself even more than everyone else did. I’ve always been a slow learner.

But the shirt lives on, in memory if nothing else. It reminds me of everything I lost, and what I still stand to lose. My dad, as so often, was right all along. The worst presents are sometimes the most useful.