Do yourself a favor and Google "novelty gift" right now and see what comes up. Here's an image search for you:

What do you notice about everything on the page there? I'll give you a hint: They're all worthless pieces of useless shit. Now, to be fair, we can forgive the "useless" part of that description. Novelties are by definition often pretty useless. However, that doesn't mean they need to be worthless pieces of shit.

Remember Big Mouth Billy Bass? The people who make it are convinced that more of those were sold than Tickle Me Elmos, which sold in the millions. That means potentially tens of millions of Big Mouth Billy Basses are littered across the globe, their gaping maws collecting dust after the one and only time someone allowed it to sing "Don't Worry, Be Happy" before it was thrown in a rage in a corner to be forgotten forever by everyone.

Clearly Big Mouth Billy Bass was one of the most popular novelty gifts of all time. It's a singing fish. If Big Mouth Billy Bass were a person, it would be a mime who can only do the "stuck in a box" routine and occasionally moans or grunts during the act. Why would you dream of inflicting that on anyone?

A novelty gift is basically the last defense against giving someone a $5 bill for Christmas. It's your subconscious' way of saying "Fuccccccccccccck" and just rolling over to have a dissatisfied, fitful nap.

There is no joy in a Chia Pet. It's a piece of pottery on which you slather a seed paste. Later the seeds grow and the world frowns because why? Why is this happening? I presume there is literally no one on Earth who has actively had a desire for a Chia Pet. At best are people who don't seethe when they receive them, which is probably not a great demographic to work with.

Trust that no one in your family or really anyone with whom you have a relationship that you deem worthy of gift giving wants to take five minutes out of their day to slather weed blossoms on a mass-produced pottery trinket and then let it live out its life in neglect by a window. Because no one would ever want that.

There are currently a dillion board games on the market, and each one in turn is exponentially less fun to play than the one before it. If you played all the board games available at your local Walmart, by the time you got to the 10th one, your only salvation would be if you rolled the dice and landed on a space that just shot you in the face. For every good board game, someone invents 30 more meant to teach you the true meaning of Arbor Day, or that require you to roll the same number thrice on a 20-sided die to proceed through the pretend volcano and earn the Golden Nugget, or just suck a loaf of dick.

There are only a handful of board games that are fun to play, and that's been the case since the 1970s. If you have the urge to buy someone a board game, buy one of the five that people play and then splash holy water on all the others and curse them in Latin so that they don't dare try to haunt you in your dreams. Because they will. You'll be convinced for days that maybe you really do need to buy True Blood: Night Eternal and that no, it's not worse than hepatitis. But of course that's wrong. So, so wrong.

It's 2013. The next calendar you buy would be for 2014. Do you know what's significant about the year 2014? It's the International Year of Who the Fuck Uses Calendars Still. I currently have a calendar on my phone, my watch, two computers, a tablet, and an iPod. Plus I get about two free calendars in the mail every year between December and January. The only one I use is the calendar my city sends me to let me know when garbage day is. It's the most useful of all of them, and I don't pay for it because why would I?

Giving a calendar for Christmas is like giving someone a pack of unfiltered cigarettes and opium suppositories to help fix their tragic case of consumption. A hundred years ago this would have been met with cries of "bully" and a round of hot toddies. Today you're just someone with a hard-on for the decimation of forests or someone who lives in a shack for whom the passage of time means little anyway.

Ostensibly the only real draw for a calendar in the modern era is the series of pictures included with it. To that I would suggest there is no series of images of kittens, horses, boobie ladies, or proctological X-rays you can assemble across 12 months that isn't readily available on the Internet right now. Maybe just look at those instead. Maybe just admit to your cousins that you don't like them rather than passive-aggressively giving them calendars that say the same thing for 365 straight days.

Last year my aunt got me a giant wicker basket that did not contain the burned and bee-stung corpse of Nic Cage. Instead it contained shortbread cookies that proclaimed to be Scottish in origin and made my mouth as dry as the Sahara after a single bite. There were also approximately 1,000 tiny strawberry candies that seemed to have been included in lieu of Styrofoam peanuts, three jars of exotic jellies, a massive, phallic elk sausage, a jar of birch syrup, a bevy of processed cheese flavored with such unique spices as "dirt" and "feet," crackers made from some kind of grain that hasn't been widely harvested since man first attempted to tame the wolf, and a DVD copy of Shallow Hal. The card explained the presence of the Jack Black film because he's funny, you see, and I make funny. We're co-workers.

I like greasy, room-temperature cheese and cracker-shaped plaster chips as much as anyone, but I feel those are really personal purchases. Those are the things a man needs to buy alone along with his condoms and alligator clips. Everything you can get in a basket comes in a basket because each part on its own is a lazy insult. It's like telling someone their momma's so fat, she ... probably ... likes pie. Then you just shrug and walk away because you're not emotionally invested enough to give a shit. That's each piece of a basket. When you put them together, the power of each kind of crappy gift creates a shitty gift Voltron that has the power to stand on two feet for as long as it takes to peel off that objectionable layer of too-thick plastic they're always wrapped in and peruse every item until it fully sinks in just how much you don't actually want to make use of anything in the basket. Because there's never been a time when you sincerely wanted a 3-ounce jar of gooseberry marmalade unless you have a serious gooseberry fetish and a penchant to jam that little fella in your ass. But even then, buy that by itself, save yourself some trouble.