‘Tis the season of giving - or regiving according to new reseach. Take part in our re-gifting amnesty and get back on Santa’s nice list.

A comb when you’re bald? Kitchen scissors for a six-year-old? A bicycle rescue kit? The claus are out for Father Christmas, who doesn’t get it right as often as we think.

According to a recent Amazon.co.uk poll, three quarters of us fake liking our gifts, with more than two in five of us rewrapping them and giving them to somebody else the next year.

“My dad is the ultimate re-gifter. Every year we ask him to write a list of things he might want for Christmas and he just says ‘I have everything I need’. Very annoying because we can’t possibly sit around the Christmas tree with nothing for him to open,” confessed a colleague.

“Most presents we get him end up at the local charity shop, but last year I thought I’d got it really right. Dad cycles everywhere so I purchased the most practical present I could think of - a basket filled with inner tubes, spare lights, puncture repair kits etc, all things he could use.

“Alas, on my husband’s birthday what showed up among the presents? Yep, dad’s basket of bike goodies. So I get the hint dad, I’m not buying you anything this year... you can have some extra sprouts at lunch instead.”

Another workmate told me come Christmas morning, he’s been locked in a running battle for years with his dear mum. He takes pride in being able to guess what she’s got him before it’s opened, while she tries in many different ways to make it harder to do so - involving presents in weird boxes of strange shapes etc.

“Be warned. This has seriously backfired on me and at times leads to some very weird and bizarre presents - just so I don’t guess them. Being a massive music fan, CDs always figure high on the wish-list but not wanting me to guess which CD I’d got led to the gifting of a Savage Garden album from my mum one year. That was definitely a low light,” he added.

“Worse than that was a gift around 10 years ago of a comb. By this stage I’d been pretty much completely bald for about a decade. The look on my mum’s face when she realised what she’d done was a better present than any money could buy.”

When it comes to strange presents, this takes some beating.

“One of my eccentric aunties once got me a pair of kitchen scissors for a Xmas present - bearing in mind I was six-years-old - which must have been a regifting,” a colleague told me.

“we did secret Santa in our family among our auntie and uncles because of the ridiculous amount of cousins they have to buy for. If we ever got Auntie J we were always mentally prepared for a disappointment.”

• Email your re-gifting nightmares or crimes to wayne.savage@archant.co.uk in confidence.