At one hour past midnight on Christmas Day, two bottles of Chanel perfume appeared on the internet auction site eBay, priced at £1. “I kind of couldn’t wait to open my presents,” said the seller, Nicky Lagah, 21, an office administrator from Luton. “It was from a second cousin. I’m quite picky about perfume. I normally go for Estée Lauder. Chanel’s just not my taste. It retails for £60 in the shops, so it’s worth selling it. The money will go towards my sale shopping, which started on Boxing Day in Milton Keynes.”

Not everyone was as quick off the mark as Ms Lagah, but by the afternoon of Christmas Day, hundreds of Britons had followed suit. At 3.13pm a man posted a 1995 Suzuki Vitara Sport, a 4x4 vehicle that had been a Christmas present for his wife. For reasons that he was reluctant to divulge, it had not been deemed suitable. “I’m just hoping to get what I paid for it,” he wrote.

Other unwanted gifts told their own story, like the Sexy Miss Santa Lingerie and the Caprice Pink Lace Bra and Thong, which had “never been worn”. By the evening of Boxing Day, more than 2,000 sellers were offering their unwanted presents.

In a living room in Tunbridge Wells that day, a boy called Cameron Evans had opened a present from his grandfather. It was a pair of pyjamas. They were black, slightly gothic, and emblazoned in a graffiti-style script with the word “corkscrew”. “He looked at them,” said his mother, Mandy Evans, 35. “They weren’t really his style as they didn’t have Thomas the Tank Engine on them.” This however, was not the main problem with the pyjamas. “They would have been a good fit on a 12-year-old,” says Mandy. “Cameron is 4.”

Grandfather seemed to have forgotten how much Cameron hadn’t grown. “It’s not as if he never sees granddad,” Mandy says. Of course, Cameron was too young to know how to handle this situation like an adult: to conceal his disappointment, to wonder casually if there might be a receipt, to think of someone whose birthday was coming up. Or to take a digital photo of the present and flog it in an online auction. This latter course of action, his mother took for him.

An ICM survey carried out before Christmas suggested that Britons would receive £4 billion worth of unwanted presents this Christmas and that 37 per cent of us would be prepared to sell them on. You can “re-gift” unwanted presents to a stranger via the website freecycle.org, you can list them for sale on Amazon or Craigslist, but by far the most popular market place for these unwanted objects was on eBay.

Each seller had a balance to strike between their unwanted present being desirable, and their unwanted present being unwanted. Some thought it not worth the effort. “I thought we were friends until I opened this Christmas gift,” wrote a seller called diginloz of an “unwanted horrible tatty black boa thing”.

Further “horrible” gifts followed. “I would make a bid,” wrote one eBay visitor, “but knowing my luck I would win.”

It appears that eBay was less an auction for these people than a means of venting their frustrations after a day spent with their nearest and dearest. A seller called stevohendo put up an “Unwanted Xmas present from mother-in-law”. He had not bothered to open it because, as he explained, his mother-in-law’s gifts were usually “a bag of sh1te” (sic).

Someone from eBay got in touch, however, and advised that he peek behind the wrapping paper so that he knew what was being sold. It turned out to be a camera. “The present is now wanted having opened it,” he told me via e-mail. “It’s the mother-in-law that’s not wanted.” In-laws were a general target of criticism. David Paylor, 39, received a calendar from his sister-in-law entitled “Nuns Having Fun”.

“There is a rock‘n’roll band composed entirely of nuns. There are nuns playing twister. Nuns fishing. It really isn’t as exciting as it sounds. I suppose it has a certain charm, but it’s not something that you would want to look at for 30 days, then turn a page only to see another lot of nuns.

“I wish I knew why my sister-in-law thought it was an appropriate gift for a 39-year-old father of six. It’s not like she’s ever caught me in costume or anything.” Paylor is a househusband, he is totally preoccupied with running after his children, who are between ten months old and 9. His wife is a chartered accountant. He has never had a thing for nuns.

“Maybe it’s all the rage in New York and I’m behind the times, which is entirely possible living in rural Hampshire,” he says. He doesn’t sound convinced.