7 Overdone Holiday Gifts We Actually Love Receiving Every Year

While holiday season is always full of exciting surprises, there are some things you can count on appearing every year.

One of these things is tired, clichéd holiday gifts. When they inevitably show up, you can mumble and groan to yourself, or you can embrace all the reasons they've become go-to gifts. Here are our favorite obvious and overused presents and why we love them.

1. Bath Sets

Whether it's lotions, soaps or body sprays, gift sets of flowery fragrances are one of the biggest clichés in gift-giving. They can be super impersonal, with any set appropriate for pretty much any girl on your holiday list, but that's kind of why we love them. They're usually a little too pricey for us to invest in ourselves, and you can never have too much nice-smelling stuff.

 

2. Socks

Socks have a reputation for being a terrible gift, but times have changed. Sock companies have seriously upped their game in terms of gorgeous patterns and adorable prints, and it's almost guaranteed you can find socks repping your fave pop-culture icon. We're currently obsessed with a company called Sock It to Me, who've sent us many-a-pair of adorable socks. They also have a monthly subscription box that's absolutely worth getting. These monster and cheesegrater socks came in our latest box and it's hard not to be obsessed.

 

3. Fast Food Gift Cards

Gift cards are the quintessential lazy and/or thoughtless gift, but we actually can't get enough of them. It would be totally weird to gift someone a Subway footlong or a Chipotle burrito, but a gift card to those places is genuinely useful. We were going to be eating there anyway, so why not use someone else's generous gift to do so?

 

4. Pajamas

We don't know about you, but we never buy ourselves pajamas, and the holidays are the season of finally receiving new ones so we can retire the old. Even if that one family member bought the exact same PJ set for every kid in the family, it's going to be put to good use—until next December, at least.

 

5. Movie Tickets

Movie tickets are another impersonal holiday gift that are still a great present for pretty much anybody. No matter what kind of person you are, there's probably a movie coming out in the next couple of months that has your name on it. Who doesn't like movies?

 

6. Amazon Gift Cards

We predict that one day, the holidays will just be a big circle of people exchanging Amazon gift cards with one another. Until then, they're a present that requires absolutely no knowledge of the person you're gifting, but the potential to be put to good use is almost unlimited.

 

7. Chocolate!

Chocolate is a gift for the person you don't know at all, but it's still one of our favorite holiday presents of all time. Those Ferrero Rocher hazelnut boxes might be a sign that someone forgot about you until the last minute and grabbed you something at the drugstore really fast, but we'll honestly take one of those over most gifts.

 

Want to avoid the obvious route? Click HERE to for a list of thoughtful yet foolproof gift ideas for anyone on your list.