If Santa brought you coal, avoid a post-Christmas faux pas

The haze of your Christmas dinner is wearing off. Your spoils from Santa can now be seen in the light of day. Whether you were a fantastic thespian or not when you opened that terrible gift, now is the time to decide what to do with it.

The day after Christmas is traditionally the fifth biggest shopping day of the year. So if you’re ready to fight for parking spots and walk through the bustling mall, it might be the time to make your returns, or should you?

Not everyone was as lucky as KIRO Radio’s Chris Sullivan. “Santa treated me well this year.”

The crew on Seattle’s Morning News decided to stay tight-lipped about their less-than-awesome gifts they received this year, but about five years ago KIRO Radio and 710 ESPN’s Bill Swartz got something that’s been relegated to the back of his closet.

It was a trench coat. He believes that before it was gifted to him it belonged to someone else. And he’s never felt the need to wear it but he can’t get rid of it.

“I don’t want to get rid of it because I don’t want to have to explain it,” Swartz said. So years later, it’s still in the closet, just in case.

Some might find themselves hanging on to a gift that they really didn’t want, so watch out for it under the tree next year.

KIRO Radio’s Ursula Reutin has found herself on both sides of re-gifting: This year she re-gifted a present to her niece. She defended herself to scoffs from Swartz and Sullivan by saying she had forewarned her brother of the re-gifting taking place. “I told my brother, ‘this is for my niece and I added something to it.'”

Hopefully the original gifter wasn’t there when Ursula’s niece opened her treat. Last year, Ursula got an unpleasant surprise when a gift she gave her sister, “a beautiful basket of teas,” was under the tree for someone else.

If you are looking to exchange your stocking stuffers or bigger ticket items soon, the crew has some recommendations. First, if it was a gift from a close family member, suggest they come with you to return the gift and then pick out something you might enjoy instead.

If your family is too petty for that, consider starting something like one man’s organization that has taken on new meaning following SuperStorm Sandy. Where To Turn in New York has a re-gifting program that will take an unwanted item, of any kind, and distribute it to a family that really needs it.

Just because Christmas is over doesn’t mean the holiday spirit needs to fizzle out.