When I was college professoring, the gifts arrived at mid-term, which is usually when students discovered great personal interest in their grades, so I'm not sure if the things received were gifts or bribes...
In any event, aside from numerous pen and pencil sets, a few cards, a few gift cards (Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble, always Barnes & Noble), plus books and notes and invitations to this's-and-thats's' and assorted edibles, the one that stands out the most was a gift of fresh, homemade egg rolls provided by a Vietnamese student. Man, those things were good. See, I normally dislike egg rolls, or at least the ones commonly served in the Chinese restaurants around here, which seem to be mostly cabbage and a fried, doughy shell. But what made the homemade ones stand out was a distinct lack of fried greasiness, bright crunchy orange carrot bits inside, tasty meat and spice and who-know-what-else-was-in-there that made them yummy. Oh, and they were hand-delivered, as the student said, fresh from her mother's kitchen (still steaming, they were).
One other gift that stood out was a working marker for the dry-erase boards we used at the college, and for which there perpetually proved a discouraging disparity between working markers (few, and rarely in any of the rooms in which I taught), and non-working ones (which seemed to proliferate like rabbits).
