Quick & Easy Home-made Gifts for Holiday Season

In the past a big hit for any occasion was home made fudge, jam, or cookies, put into special gift containers such as tins, decorated jars, etc. Was not overly expensive, made good personal gifts, and everybody loved them.

D. P.

I don't know what you can afford. but paper ornaments with fingerprints on them, have been one of my most cherished ornaments all of my mommy years. I take them out every Christmas, ans just melt when I see those tiny fingerprints. One year I took my first grson to a ceramic place and did his footprints on a plate, he was 9 mo. A snapshot, or a blown up rint, is always nice. Homemade candy, fudge, or a nice lb cake would make me very happy. For kids, how about 5 $1 gift cards to a dollar tree. Play dough, homemade, is great, all colors, you can include a cookie cutter and and a rolling pin from dollar tree.

do you crochet? I've beena ble to make lots of cute things including crocheting beads onto little girls socks, making hats, doilies and different things. Take a stroll around a craft store and look at some of their books and magazines. Christmas ornaments are a great handmade craft to make for people and the kids can help.

Also, one thing that my family does since we have quite a number of us :) we each get a gift bag and then everyone brings small handmade or $1 gifts to put in each bag so it only costs poeple about 10 dollars each but we all get lots of goodies.

There is a website called www.thriftyfun.com that has some great ideas. I subscribed to get their e-newsletter each day, but their site is filled with suggestions for homemade things. Also, I haven't visited the site in a while, but I believe it was called www.makingbysaving.com and it had forums with people asking all kinds of questions about being thrifty. Hope these help inspire you!

Just checked and the second site I mentioned is still there- just click on "message board" to see the forums.

I once received a gift for my children of handmade bean bags. They were simply squares of colorful fabric sewn together and filled with rice. These were entertainment for YEARS for different ages. For some adults in my family this year I found a recipe for a spice rub used when cooking. I am making a big batch and putting it in containers and giving it with some grill tongs. For grandparents one year my kids each painted a picture. I cut out a square of the picture, measuring 4x6, and then found a frame that held three 4x6 pictures and I framed the "artwork". My intention was to replace the artwork yearly but we haven't quite done that. If you do crosstitch - one year I gave all my nieces and nephews a Christmas ornament that I had cross-stitched. They still tell me how much they loved it (they were teens at the time) and how special it is. Lastly, we got a popcorn bucket and filled it with candy and treats you would find at the movies. Then made a certificate saying that we wanted to spend an evening with Grandpa watching a movie of his choice. Very inexpensive and something fun to look forward to doing together.

Hi K.,
Mostly for the adults I make cookies and fudge and put it in a nice decorative box.
One thing that I do for my nieces is buy them a membership to the St. Louis zoo...I have 3 nieces and the membership costs $60...I look at it as I spent $20 on each of them and it lasts them an entire year....most zoo's, science centers, and museums have memberships.

Just a thought....check out clearance items too. That is what I do for their birthdays. I buy them pj's or a very inexpensive outfit.

Jen

Hi K. -
Congrats on thinking ahead, something I always *mean* to do when it comes to craft-making.....

Here's a site I came across recently, though I'm sure there are more craft sites online than your mouse could click.

http://familyfun.go.com/arts-and-crafts/

Have fun!

K.,
With the economy as bad as it is, none of us have the money anymore to spend on Christmas.
If you have a computer, a photo printer, how about making a calendar for all of the family, young and old, with pics and preprinted birthdays and anniversaries, etc. If you don't have a binder, you can get them all printed out and take them to a place like Office Max and you can have them punch holes in them and bind them with one of those plastic binders so that it looks very professional. It makes really great gifts that everyone loves.
Also I have never done this but a girl that I worked with one time did this. She took a picture of her daughter, took it to some place like Office Max and had them put the picture on some kind of thick mat and then had a machine cut it into puzzle pieces and then gave them to her mother and grandmother for a puzzle. Then they glued it and put it in a frame. It was kind of neat. I had never head of that until then.

You can pick up some great iron-on patches at walmart or hobby lobby. If you scoop up a few cheap t-shirts/hoodies you can make your own shirts for the kids. Hobby lobby has a great selection of patches(found some great ones for my 6mth daughter- 'night owl' w/adorable owls or 'stink happens' w/a skunk). For Halloween, I made my own matching pirate shirts for my daughters by dying a shirts they already had black and ironing on skull'n'crossbones patches. You can even choose iron-on gem art. Great for a personalized gift that looks high-end.

K.,
We make cookies and give a dozen Christmas cookies as a gift to teachers, Sunday school teachers, the pastor, aunts, and uncles. Some years we do a plate with a variety of cookies and other years we make choc chip cookies or peanut butter with M&M cookies and put them in the little decorated treat bags.

We have a huge extended family on both sides of the family and we stopped giving gifts to each other years ago. Now we all bake something and exchange that at Christmas. The only ones we buy gifts for at Christmas are our children and our spouses. We go in together and get grandma and grandpa a big gift.
S.

Hi K.,
Our family has gotten so large we came up with a great idea ... we love love. It's the grap bag. Each person in the family brings atleast 3 or 4 items ( dollar store, dollar general or $5 or less. Everything is put in a bag and passed around. Your not allowed to looked .. just feel inside the bag. You can trade .. you may have something some one else might want , etc. We also include gag gift items also. We also have a grap bag for the kids. Dollar Store items are great. Your family will have a blast, ours does. It's the quality time that most of us just don't have time for anymore.
T.

You could make stockings for everyone and put their name on it with glitter or whatever you feel is of your crafty calibur. You can buy small stockings if you are not able to make them. You could fill them w/ cookies, candy, even buy cheap lotions from Bath and Body, etc There are many, many cheap things out there now. Target has a $1 section with many cute things. You can make a photo album or scrap book. You can buy the scrapbooks at a craft store and then stickers for each page. You add the photos of your family and then add stickers and little crafty foam or felt things around the pics to make them personal.

You can also buy the wooden unfinished frames and decorate them with crafty items and put a pic of the kids in it. I would browse the craft aisle if the store to get ideas. You can have the kids paint or color a pretty picture and then frame it. Supposedly you can have good copies made of them too to give to a few people in the family.

You can make a video of the kids and make copies to give to family.

You can have the kids stamp, paint, color, draw on cardstock and then give a stack of cards with a nice pen wrapped with a ribbon. Everyone can always use cards to mail out. If you stamp them or even have them draw a pic, there are stamps for the inside that you can make some that say "thanks", "get well" happy bday" etc You can even buy the plain bags and stamp them with pretty tissue paper to match. You can make wine corks with a button hot glued on top of the cork, you can use doorknobs, anything cute, you can hot glue or screw into the top of a cork and give with a bottle of wine. You can buy the corks at a craft store.

For kids you can find all kinds of crafts in the craft store to make. At Michael's they offer craft Saturdays at the store. Maybe they would make something there they could give. You could put together in a small baggie some hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows and then draw or stamp a snowman on a topper to close the bag. It is called Snowman soup. Good gift for teachers or for kids. You can also take a candy cane and dip 1/2 it into chocolate and then even in nuts and bag nicely and tie with a ribbon. Or you can take a candy cane and with felt you can make it look like a reindeer with a small red felt ball nose. I bet you can google many things online. Good idea! have fun.

W.

I love the zoo or museum membership idea! Great!

My opinion on food though is negatory. Everyone gives so much food and it is so bad for us. Most people don't want to eat it all the calories between the breads, cookies, candies, etc.

We are thinking of doing lottery tickets this year for a few friends?? Never done that before, but at least it is a little exciting and doesn't cost much.

For kids, why not go ahead and buy them a TINY gift from somewhere like the dollar tree or Dollar General. You may spend more money trying to "make" them something than if you go somewhere like that. Kids generally love little silly things that are only a couple of dollars. My two older sons got some very nice gifts for their recent birthdays (6 and 8) - their favorites were a pack of "growing sponges shaped like animals" and a pack of straw balloons - you know those tubes of liquid latex that you put on a straw and blow up the balloon? I know they came from somewhere like the Dollar Tree - and they stole the show of all the things the boys got. I think sometimes adults feel the pressure to spend spend spend on their kids and the only thing that happens is the kids get overwhelmed with a ton of stuff that they don't end up playing with for a long time.

For adults, maybe you could write a special poem for them and print it out on nice paper, or a letter telling them how much they mean to you. In fact, you could even do this for the kids as well. It will be something they treasure some day.

T.

Chocolate cover just about anything.
No, I'm serious. I do it every year the adults love it and my kids' friends have started looking forward to it. I do long pretzels in milk, dark and/or white chocolate and use sprinkles to make them look "festive" I also do nuts (just about any kind that you can get your hands on) coconut, popcorn, cherries, and the smaller pretzels or broken pieces from the big ones. This works out great, because all of the stuff is on sale at some point and if you have leftovers they keep for a long time.

Ok, I also just thought of a web site called lulu.com It is for self publishing. You can make a wall calender for a little over $10 each. How cool would that be to have the kids design some of the months and add pictures to some of them? You do it all by computer and you can just order the ones that you want to give as gifts and if anybody else wants to have one they can order it themselves. It's different that is why I thought it was kind of neat. It does depend on how many you need though, because 1 was over $12, but 5 are only a little over $10 each. Just a thought for something out of the ordinary.

K.,
We too have to cut back this year. I already informed the family and friends that we ususally exchange with this year that we are only doing our children, and our godchildren and not their siblings. Some of our godchildren have three to four siblings. It's just too much this year. For grandparents we saved the school pictures that get taken at the beginning of the school years and putting them in a nice frame. I bought clear ornaments on clearence last year, I am filling them with glittler paint and writting the kids names on it and with the date.
I like the homemade food ideals, we do salsa and chips. My hubby cans salsa all summer and we pair it up with a bag of cornchips for gifts. Our family loves it.
I think too, just be upfront with family and friends and it's not the presents, it's the thought behind it. Today's generation is too caught up in material things. Coupons for 'time', or baby sitting, or chores even are nice little things to do for someone.
Good luck and get creative.
May God Bless you this Christmas season.
T.

I get my daughter, 14 a puzzle or two every year since she was very young. She is a reader and I pick up books at yard sales and thrift shops for gifts. My son still loves yo-yo's even though he is 17 - they are pretty inexpensive. Each kids also gets a calendar to put in their rooms - these also can be picked up at dollar store. Since they are older now - they are given a choice of one large gift (to be shared between them) or each a gift split. I generally can keep the budget to a low roar. I do have their grandmother make them homemade slippers and scarves each year too and even though they are teens, they still enjoy getting this homemade gift - and my daughter has shown interest in learning herself how to make scarves.

Hope this helps!

Hi K.,
A home made gift certificate for adults with kids for babysitting for an evening. Or you could give them a book of home made gift certificates for things like one home cooked meal at your house, rake their leaves, mow their lawn, clean their house etc.

For adults or kids you could do a mini scrap book and leave it blank so they can fill it up or an autograph book for kids made from colored paper, or this book could be used as a diary.
Have fun. Happy creating.

Here is a website that has some awesome ideas! I just made the Molly Monkey for my daughter's birthday and it was fairly easy. It was my very first attempt at doll making and it turned out beautifully! I am so excited about giving it to her. So cute! She just posted about homemade holiday ideas. Hope this helps! http://mmmcrafts.blogspot.com/

A couple of years ago I found calendars for the following year at Michaels, in the dollar bins, that you could put a photo on each page/month. I always have extra photos as I get doubles, and even used up some older pictures of my kids, and gave them to their grandmas for Christmas, who loved them. Kids love to see pictures of themselves so that might work for them too. If you don't have pictures of the people you want to give to, you could ask if they have leftover/double pictures.

I've also known of people who had a family portrait taken and gave that as gifts (seemed cheesy to me as a kid, but portraits can be expensive...)

If you scrapbook, you could do a scrapbook page that would be suitable for putting in a frame to display and give that.

Also, you could probably fairly easily make simple gifts out of fleece, like mittens, hats, scarves, etc. Do a search on familycrafts.about.com, or an internet search for "easy fleece projects".

You can find recipes online to make bubble solution, and then find bubble wands, which would make an inexpensive gift that small kids love.

Good luck!

Hi K.. My family and I usually go to the Dollar Tree to buy things for our gifts. For instance, buy a few differnet size coffee mugs for hot cocoa,soup,latte,coffee,etc. At the Dollar Store buy a box of hot chocolate mix, soup mix, can of latte mix, or a small bag of coffee. To wrap these gifts, first wrap the bottom of the shoe box inside and out. Then, place the shoe box on its side and set the mugs inside with the handdles facing each other. Use bread ties to secure the mugs. Next tape the bottom of whatever mix you would like to use and wrap the gift with celophane paper and wrap the top of the paper with a ribbon. A.

K.,
I think this is a common issue with many, many people this year. I have already told my grandchildren that theirs will be handmade gifts this Christmas. I do sew, and purchased Christmas flannel (30% off at Hancock's) and am making them matching pajamas and nightgowns. I've just about finished those.
Another idea I have is to take some of the beautiful fabric remnants in my studio (I'm an interior designer) and make very fancy Christmas stockings; I might even fill them with trinkets from the Dollar store. I go to websites like Horchow and Neiman Marcus and to get ideas for the designs of my stockings. I don't copy theirs, but seeing them gets my wheels turning!
If you wanted to do this, you could go to the remnant section of a fabric store. I know that Hobby Lobby has good fabrics, and their trims are great and are often on sale.

If you're computer savvy, you can get the iron on transfer copy paper at Staples and create t-shirts, aprons, or even personalize the Christmas stockings. There are so many things that paper can be used for. I made personalized clothing labels for the Christmas pj's and nightgowns with it, saying "Love, Nanny; Christmas, 2008." That way they'll remember when and where those came from.

As always, I'll bake the Christmas cookies, etc. But it will be a much more restrained Christmas than we're used to. To tell you the truth, it's probably better for me and my family that this year we will have a quieter, gentler Christmas.

Let us know what you decide to do!

C.

We give pictures to most of the extended family for Christmas. I usually burn picture cds for everyone with shots of the kids from the past year. We have a family picture taken and give prints of that as well. If you sew at all you can do many things. Just look for project ideas online. There are adorable clothes to be made for girls out of pillowcases or bandanas. I embroider so I buy blanks- towels, shirts, etc. - to make home gifts. You could do some cute things with fabric paint too. Maybe the kids could even make gifts to give by painting shirts or mugs or unpainted wooden things you can find at craft stores or dollar stores. Grandparents always love things with the kid's handprint, even if its just a piece of cardstock in a frame.

There are some very simple sewing patterns out there for stuffed animals or bean bags or wash mitts etc...

Ornaments are nice gifts, too. They can be purchased just about anywhere and many of them are under $5.

P

My aunt used to fix up all her sibling's familys a gift box full of cookies, fudge, and candies. You can make like a batch of chocolate chips, a batch of buckeyes, some potato candy and other things. You can through things in like hot wheels for boys and beaded necklaces or braclets. Kids love coloring books and crayons. After the school supply rush you can get a box of crayons for 5 cents. I look for sales all year and make a small grab bag for my nieces and nephews for Easter. They love the stuff and act like it cost a million dollars and you may only have 5-10 dollars in it. Dont underestimate the dollar store either. They have great items there that kids love. I have gotten great Christmas presents there. All kids like crafts and you can buy them a craft kit and give it to them. Im sure you will come up with something.

Last year I began yard saling early... I bought my teen age son a new wetsuit - for $20! Originally, $150! Also I gave gift cards of small amounts to our children. They would rather pick out what they want. How about basket gifts - getting baskets from a 2nd hand & putting nuts, fruits, etc. At another yard sale, a woman was making wreaths and decorating them w/ baby stuff... it was precious. Little baby washcloths, safety pins, just everyday stuff! Hope this helps! J.

How about baking cookies, wrapping them in a holiday container or a ziploc bag decorated with holiday stickers or a bag that is already decorated. If you know thier favorite type of cookies then bake those. We are also having a family meal together instead of gifts. Everyone brings a side dish or dessert and everyone chips in on the meat before hand. If you have really young ones coloring books with crayons are good. If they are older blank paper with markers, colored pencils or crayons would be appropiate. My sister-in-laws family(large) plays games-board and card. They always take pennies for Penny Poker. I am not sure how they play it. They also do a Rob your Neighbor game with gifts regular and gag gifts.