Over Christmas, my wife and myself got together with her family. It’s a tradition for her dad’s side of the family to get together every other Christmas and rent out the gym at the local school. They all get together and play basketball and other games and to end the night there is a white elephant gift exchange.

When these people give crappy gifts, they mean it. There was a frog dressed in a pink matador outfit playing golf. There was an octopus wearing a flower print dress and bonnet that was a piggy bank. I got a stuffed Taco Bell dog. It was brutal.

That event of course brought out the story of the best white elephant gift of all time.

The recipient of the gift was my wife’s aunt, Jeannette. As she tore through the rapping paper that year she found a medical jar. And what did the jar contain? Her own appendix that she had removed some 15 years earlier.

This story is too crazy for anyone to think up. Someone found the appendix in a jar of formaldehyde in her mother’s basement (Jeanette’s mother and my wife’s grandmother had passed away that year). They wrapped it up for the white elephant gift and Jeanette ended up with it.

Like I said… Best White Elephant Gift Ever!