60 Unique Facts about Gifts Given By People

George Clooney purchased a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Max as a gift for then-girlfriend, actress Kelly Preston. When their relationship ended, Clooney kept the pig for an additional 18 years until Max died in 2006. He has jokingly referred to Max as the longest relationship he had ever had.

2. After Oprah’s famous “You get a car” episode, where she gave away 276 cars at a total cost of $7.6 million, many of the recipients sent in complaints to the show as they had all been charged a $6,000 -$7,000 “gift tax.”

3. A "white elephant gift exchange" gets its name from the legend of the King of Siam gifting rare albino elephants to those who displeased him in hopes that the upkeep costs would financially ruin them.

4. In 2017, after firefighters saved piglets from a barn fire in the Wiltshire County in England, the farmer sent them sausages made from the piglets, 6 months later, as a thank you gift.

5. Neils Bohr was gifted a house with free beer for life on winning the Nobel. A beer pipeline was connected from the Carlsberg brewery next door to this house. Bohr stayed there from 1932 until his death in 1962.

Eight-year-old Gabi Mann of Seattle, Washington receives gifts from crows in her garden. She feeds the crows regularly and little "treasures" are given in return including a miniature silver ball, a black button, a blue paper clip, a yellow bead, a blue Lego piece, and a pearl-colored heart.

7. President Andrew Jackson was gifted a 1,400-pound block of cheese by a New York dairy farmer. The cheese remained on display at the White House for over a year but was entirely eaten by a large crowd during Jackson's final party as President.

8. Joe Perry sold his 1959 Gibson Les Paul during his 1982 divorce. Later he found the guitar was owned by Slash. Perry called Slash and bugged him for years, offering to pay more than the guitar's worth. Years later, at Joe's 50th birthday party, Slash finally gave him the guitar as a gift.

9. The famous deaf-blind writer Hellen Keller received a gift from a Japanese police officer who gave her an Akita dog named Kamikaze-Go as a present. After the dog's death, Japan’s government gifted another Akita, making her the first person to bring the dog breed to the U.S. in 1948.

10. In 1951, Thelma Howard was hired as a maid for Walt and Lillian Disney. Walt would gift her shares of Disney stock every X-mas for the next 30 years. When she died in 1994, it was discovered she still had all 192,000 shares valued at $9,000,000. It went to disadvantaged kids and her disabled son.

One of Saint Nicholas' most famous gifts was giving a poor man enough money for each of his three daughters to have a proper dowry. This allowed the three girls to avoid a lifetime of prostitution to make ends meet.

12. Nintendo character Kirby was named after John Kirby, the legal counsel for Nintendo who helped them win their lawsuit with Universal Studios in 1982. John Kirby was gifted a sailboat Christened the “Donkey Kong” and given exclusive rights to name any boat he owned “Donkey Kong.”

13. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gifted US President John F. Kennedy a dog called Pushinka during the cold war. She, later on, had puppies; which Kennedy referred to as “the pupniks.”

14. For 25 years, two brothers (Roy Collette and Larry Kunkel) re-gifted each other the same pair of pants, in increasingly inventive and difficult packaging, including a 600lb safe, a double-glazed window, a 16-foot rocket ship, and a crushed car, with a card that read "Merry Christmas, the pants are in the glove box."

15. In 1854, American naval officer Matthew C. Perry gifted 110 gallons of American Whiskey to the Japanese emperor. That gift has since evolved into a $6 billion industry, with Japan's Suntory distillery winning 2015's World Whisky of the Year. Today, Suntory owns Jim Beam.

In 1926, President Coolidge and his wife were gifted a raccoon as a Thanksgiving dinner gift. They did not want to eat her, so they named her Rebecca and kept her as a pet. She had free range of The White House and would go on trips with the couple.

17. When Samuel Adams received a female slave as a wedding gift, he insisted that "a slave can not live in my house; if she comes she must be free." He was able to free her after years of writing emancipation papers and treated her as an equal family member throughout that time.

18. Before his death, author Robert Louis Stevenson gifted his friend's daughter his own birthday. The daughter had been born on Christmas and complained she felt like she had no real birthday.

19. In 1998, United Nations was gifted 11-foot bronze statue of an elephant by the governments of Kenya, Namibia, and Nepal, but UN decided to hide it because the statue has an erect penis.

20. Henry III received a polar bear as a gift from King Haakon of Norway in 1252. The bear lived at the Tower of London and was given a long leash so it could swim in the river Thames and catch fish.

Queen Mary of England was gifted a 1:12 scale dollhouse in 1924. It had working lights, books that were specially written by writers for the library, bottles filled with the appropriate drinks in the wine cellar, and model cars made by Rolls Royce. Even the toilets had working plumbing.

22. The gavel used by the UN President is called "Thor's gavel" as it was gifted to the UN by Iceland's first permanent UN representative Thor Thors.

23. There was a tradition in Norway, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands where a girl would knit a "willy warmer" (also known as cock sock) to their boyfriends to see how seriously he took their relationship. If the gift was rejected, it was seen as evidence that he was not ready for marriage.

24. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, two extremely wealthy entrepreneurs, sent each other gag Christmas gifts. Rockefeller sent Carnegie a cardboard vest to make fun of his poor childhood. In return, Carnegie sent a fine whiskey to Rockefeller, a devout Baptist who had given up drinking.

25. Abram Petrovich Gannibal was an African child who was kidnapped, taken to Russia and was presented as a gift for Peter the Great. The Tsar freed him and raised him as his godson. Gannibal became a Major-General and the Governor of Reval. He is the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, considered the greatest Russian poet.