Quote Originally Posted by peggy View Post
Steve: Really? Pour it out? Come on...now that would truly be wasteful wouldn't it. Not to mention disrespectful to the giver.
Yes, really, pour it out. This site is chock-full of threads with people ridding their homes of 10, 30, 100 items in short periods of time. There often is advice given about accepting an undesirable gift and then re-gifting it out of that friend network or donating it to Goodwill or the like. People here seem to have no problem moving on items they don't want.

Trouble is, alcohol comes with all kinds of restrictions on where it can go. If you don't drink it and there's no one else to whom you can pass it on and Sally Anne won't take it, you're going to enshrine it in your house forever? The last resort is to empty the bottle and recycle it. Tact suggests you don't do it as soon as you get the gift. It's OK to wait.

As for "disrespectful to the giver", once a gift is given, it belongs to the recipient and they get to decide what to do with it. And, again, this does not seem to be a problem for other kinds of gifts; only for booze. I don't understand that. If you don't want it in your house, it shouldn't be in your house, whether it's a bottle of Scotch or a ceramic figurine or a Popeil Pocket Fisherman.