The worst New Year gifts, or: eleven ways to say "you should change"

December gifts are about warmth. January gifts are about improvement, and improvement is a very short walk from criticism.

This is the only month of the year with an entire retail category dedicated to helping you inform somebody that they are, in their current form, insufficient. Below is that category, itemised.

The self-improvement industrial complex

1. The gym membership. The undisputed founder of the genre. Twelve months of somebody thinking about your body, paid for in advance and non-refundable.

2. The bathroom scale. Somehow worse. A gym membership is aspirational; a scale is a measuring device installed in somebody’s home by another person.

3. The detox tea. A gift that says: I have concerns about your internal organs, and I have acted on them.

4. The “new year, new you” book. Note the second half of the title. Note that somebody chose it for you. Note that everyone in the room can read the cover.

5. The habit tracker. Twelve months of grid paper on which somebody will now record their failures, in a notebook you gave them, which they cannot throw away because you gave it to them.

The ones that expire before February

6. The diary that dies on the 6th. Beautiful, expensive, hopeful. Entries stop somewhere around the second week, and the object survives for a decade as a small paper monument to a Tuesday.

7. The calendar of the year that has just ended. Half price, and it shows.

8. The dry-January starter kit. Given, in most cases, to someone who did not sign up for dry January, which makes it less of a gift and more of a nomination.

The ones that are simply confusing

9. Fireworks, given after New Year’s Eve. Now a household has explosives and eleven months to think about them.

10. The language course. Somebody has decided which language you should learn. Not asked. Decided.

11. The countdown clock. A device whose only function is to display how much time has passed since a moment that has already gone. Nobody has ever wanted one, and yet.

What to give in January instead

The genuine insight buried in all this: January gifts fail when they are about the year ahead and the recipient’s inadequacy in it. They work when they are about surviving the month you are actually in.

Good socks. A lamp. Proper coffee. A soup book. Something that gets used up before March. That is the whole formula, and it is why a New Year draw tends to produce better gifts than a December one — the shops are usable, the budgets have recovered, and the parcel is the only one anybody opens that week.

And if the group genuinely wants to give each other terrible things, do it deliberately: a worst-gift contest is the format where a bathroom scale is finally, correctly, a winning entry.