Who has the best Christmas Fail story? (UPDATED)

• Joeff Davis

UPDATED with our favorite Christmas Fail stories from Facebook after the jump.

Christmas dinners that end with trips to the emergency room. Office holiday revelers who flagrantly misuse mistletoe. The tragic combination of kids, incontinence and a department store Santa Claus. For every way to celebrate the December holidays, there are ways for those festivities to blow up in your face. Few things prove more disappointing than a holiday disaster, but after the fact, they become gifts that keep on giving. Christmas Fails make for great stories at family gatherings: if every holiday went off without a hitch, you’d have nothing to talk about with your relatives.

So who has the best, funniest, most lingering story of the Yuletide season gone horribly wrong? I hereby offer a Christmas Fail story from my own childhood to get the jingle-ball rolling, but surely someone can top me. The best stories get a shot at appearing in this very publication, so you could conceivably use yourself as gift-wrap.

One year at Christ the King Elementary School, my class had Secret Santas, so we picked all of each other’s names at random for a gift exchange. I don’t remember the present I gave, but it was the early 1970s, so it was probably a small Tonka truck. The time came to exchange the gifts, so I found the present marked to me under the classroom Christmas tree. Upon opening it, I saw that it was filled with tissue paper, so I rummaged through it find the present, only to realize that it contained nothing BUT tissue paper, unless it contained a diamond ring or something that I overlooked. Does that mean my mystery classmate (or his mother) deliberately gave a grade-schooler a handful of toilet paper for Christmas? Or did the kid pocket the present for himself when his mother wasn’t looking? It ruined the idea that Secret Santas work on the honor system.