A gift recipient never has anything to worry about, no matter the size, because gifts are not taxable income. Finally, note that gifts are never deductable from a gift giver's gross income. A fundamental concept to understand here is the unified credit . This is a single, combined credit amount that is applied against both gift and estate tax. A person can gift fairly large amounts annually without affecting the unified credit.
Spouses can give each other gifts of any amount without gift tax filings.
Gift splitting means a husband and wife can elect to treat a gift given by one of them as if half were given by each of them. The IRS Form 709a can be filed for notifying the IRS that gift splitting is elected. This is a bit silly in many cases, since in community property states, community property is automatically considered split equally between each spouse, but that requires the IRS to somehow know it came from community property funds and not from non-community funds. So they require you to prove it, basically. As long as the exclusion is below the maximum, no gift tax is due.