My In-Laws gave me this: [link] for Xmas, despite the fact that I have never worn a watch in the 18 years they have known me, I hate fake diamonds and have tiny hands, so the face is as big as my arm. Blue plastic and glitz, it's so me.

Okay, I was prepared to like that watch based on your description (except the diamonds, which I don't actually like, real or not) and it's fugly.

basking in the squishes

I'm waiting for someone to get home and check their front door for a package. The wait is driving me batty. What if they don't go home? What if the package isn't there? What if they don't like what's in it?

I'm basking in squishes on tenterhooks. Weird.

Squish, Deena!

Are you keeping warm this winter? (No reason.)

I am! As a matter of fact, I am, right this VERY moment, wearing the most luxuriously soft red scarfy thing ever. It's a gorgeous red, sort of cranberryish. It came from someone really smart in Chicago, who writes with the same kind of silver pen I write with, on occasion. Hmmmm.

I'd say former phase but Duranies are forever.

Word, my sistah.

Moral: I should have said what I DO like.

But, see, I think you were clear on what you don't like. It wasn't ambiguous. Don't like hearts. Don't like orange and yellow. Don't like expensive. Don't like necklaces.

Maybe it really is a thing where he heard words but only heard every other word.

My mom and I figured out each others' taste in gifts about two years before she died. But those were two nice Christmases, gift-wise. Now my sister sends me very detailed lists for her family, and I send her lists with links to the exact items (including size and color, where relevant) for myself. If I don't like what I get nowadays, I have only myself to blame. I'm all for knowing a person and shopping for something that will meet their tastes and needs, but I only see the family a couple of times a year. That's decades in teenager fashion time or 20-something geek tech time.

Moral: I should have said what I DO like.

But that's actually really hard to do, and can be pretty restrictive. No hearts should not be that complicated an instruction for an adult. We're into learned helplessness territory here, and I'm not sure I'm down with that.

My mother has finally accepted that I actually don't like the color pink. Nearly 30 years, she's been insisting that I just say that I don't like it because I don't want to seem like a stereotypical girl. A few years ago, we were at a little shop, and they had some of those vanity sets with a mirror and brush and comb, made of pewter with little rhinestones embedded. I saw one with purple rhinestones and said, "oooh," and then noticed the one next to it with green rhinestones and said, "Oooooooh," and completely ignored the one with pink rhinestones. My mom saw and heard this, and she said, really surprised, "You really don't like pink, do you?"

I'm all for knowing a person and shopping for something that will meet their tastes and needs,

This is a common (or, if not common, at least a familiar) Buffista discussion. I have no problem with lists -- detailed or not -- from family members and even the spousal substitute, and I happily give them my annotated list.

For us, it's a matter of "Let me make you happy by giving you something that I know will make you happy."

I admire the people who shop without lists, and get gifts for their loved ones based on their tastes. I sort of feel like it's a skill (one that I don't have).