Christmas is coming, and unfortunately I’m being made redundant in December and don’t yet have another job lined up. I need present ideas that aren’t going to cost me much. Perhaps something I could make? I’m not very artistic but I’m willing to give it a go.
The main people I need to do presents for are: My partner, my parents, and my partner’s parents and brother. My parents will like anything I make because that is the parents’ job and they love me. My partner and his family are all into books and theatre and such.
I am good at cooking, so I could possibly make them something foody. My main idea would be pickles or jams/preserves, but that would mean the buying of special equipment and may be more costly that simply buying them something.
I guess the most obvious would be cookies or cake or brownies or something…everybody’s got a sweet tooth…
But another idea I use sometimes is to go to the dollar store, buy some of their $1/$2 frames, and then run to Kinko’s and make a copy of a picture of myself and give it to them. It’s a sure hit with parents, and cute for the partner. If you have a pic of yourself with them, it’s even nicer. Total cost is like two/three bucks.
I also like the Five Dollar Gift Basket, which entails going to discount stores or clearance aisles and finding five things, for a dollar each, for one person. Candles, frames, bath salts, lotion, cool pens, cute notebook, small photo album, pretty storage box, silly figurine, tree ornament, coffee mug, box of tea, pet toy, etc., etc., etc., can all be found for a buck at this type of place.
And if you buy some brown paper and some ribbon, you can wrap each item without a box/container of any kind for very, very cheap. Everybody likes getting more than one thing, and it’s more thoughtful than just one item.
Snow domes. I learned how to make them yesterday and they are so easy and kids especially love them.
Take an empty jar with a water tight lid and use a hot glue gun or silicon glue to glue a small (plastic or resin) figure of something (I used a fairy, someone else used a cool looking frog) to the bottom of the lid. Wait the required drying time for the glue, then fill the jar with water, a couple of drops of food colour (I used red to make pink water - the frog water was pale green), a couple of drops of glycerine, and a good amount of glitter and little tinselly stars or what ever takes your fancy. Screw the lid onto the filled jar and turn it upside down - voila - a snow dome.
You can cover the lid with round coloured tissue paper or cellophane, tie a nice bow around it to keep it on - my 7yr old niece loved it.
Also bath salts - buy cheap crystal (rock) sea salt, put it in a bowl, add a few drops of food colouring, and a few drops of essential oil of your choice, mix well, and tie up in cellophane paper lined with a fancy paper doily and tie with a pretty ribbon or cord. (go easy with the food colouring I had visions of green and blue tinged people after seeing the amount some people were using yesterday)
my cheap gifts this year will be a variety of interesting candy from Trader Joe’s. they have divine chocolate covered coffee beans and chocolate covered (dried) strawberries, toss them in a nice cellophane bag with appropriate ribbon and gifty tag–viola! they also have some yummy looking chocolate truffles for about $4 a box.
You know, canning doesn’t really require a lot of extra equipment; you do need canning jars, but they aren’t terribly expensive. The actual canning can be done in any large stockpot; it just needs to cover the jars by a couple of inches.
Or you could try making infused oils or vinegars. Or what about making flavored booze? (Spiced rum or flavored vodka are pretty easy, but they need time to steep. If you don’t have recipes handy, let me know and I’ll try to post some later.)
As mentioned before, the dollar stores are your best friends. A pretty mug with hot cocoa/mocha/spiced tea mix in it is always nice. Or fill with candy. If they like books and theatre, maybe you can write a nice quote in calligraphy and put it in a frame. Or frame a pretty greeting card.
If you have canning jars there are a lot of jar gifts you can make - soup mixes, cocoa/mocha/spiced tea mixes, cookie mixes, etc. Just cut a little square of cloth to go over the top.
I’m giving one friend a lot of homemade bread for Christmas. I’m broke, too. It’s good, cheap, she’ll love it, and it’s pretty easy.
There’s always candlemaking, I guess. And I’m going to do the dollar-store idea, too. Not that Rue’s Performance Art idea wasn’t great. I’m sure you can find sheep.
From The Cake In A Jar cookbook. My mom and I make these for gifts – you can do this with any heavy cake or bread (like banana nut bread or applesauce cake). And they stay fresh in the jar up to a year!!
CARROT CAKE IN A JAR
2 2/3 c sugar
2/3 c shortening
4 eggs
2/3 c water
2 t vanilla
3½ c flour
1 t baking powder
2 t baking soda
1 t salt
2 t cinnamon
2 c peeled, grated carrots
2/3 c chopped nuts
In large bowl, cream sugar and shortening with electric mixer. Add eggs and mix well.
Place dry ingredients in a separate large bowl and blend with a whisk. Add creamed ingredients to dry ingredients and mix with spoon. Gently stir in carrots and nuts.
Pour 1 c batter each into 6 well-greased one-pint wide-mouth canning jars. Wipe batter from rim.
Place jars on a baking sheet. Bake at 325º for 55 minutes until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Wipe rims with warm wet clean cloth. Place hot sterilized seals and rings on hot jars. Jars will seal as they cool. And you can decorate the jar. Cake is good for up to a year.
You can get a little tiny cloth bag from the craft store. Put some whole clove, an orange, and a cinnamon stick in it. The recipient can drop the bag into a pan of water and simmer (with a couple slices of orange). It will make the house smell just like Christmas.
Picture frames (hand-painted is pretty easy to do).
Collect as many pictures of the two of you as you can find. Take them to a xerox machine, set it to reduce the pictures to a smaller size, and make lots of black-and-white xeroxes of all the pictures. (If you have a scanner and printer, it works better to scan them and shrink them before printing them off.)
Tea-stain the xeroxes. That is, let them sit in a tray with tea and then hang them to dry. Makes them look all sepia-toned.
Cut out your pictures so that there’s no border around them.
Get a durable cardboard box - like the kind that they sell to organize your snapshots, with a lid - and Mod Podge. Arrange your photos in no particular design and so that they overlap and Mod Podge them onto the box.
I made one of those for a boyfriend and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever given. It’s incredibly personal, and you can fill it with cookies or other goodies!
For the parents (both sets), I’d hit ebay. There are always great deals out there.
Do any of them like coffee? You could make them a coffee lover’s basket. You can make chocolate-dipped spoons, homemade flavored syrups, and biscotti. Get the baskets, bottles, and plastic spoons at the Dollar Tree. The food ingredients won’t cost much, even if you get fancy and drizzle chocolate all over the biscotti (I like to dip mine in dark chocolate and then drizzle with white). All the recipes are easy to find online.
Also… assuming your family and your sweetie’s family are reasonable people - they will understand that money is tight. They’ll understand that your gift is small if they know you were thinking about them. I know one year when I was pretty broke, I got my mother a second pair of driving gloves because she was always forgetting hers in her locker at work. She still remembers the fact that I thought of her problem and thought of a solution to it - and has long since forgotten that I got the gloves on sale for $7.50 at Kresges’!
For cheap books, don’t forget your local Oxfam. Better yet, make the arduous cross country trek to Oxford and root around in the Oxfam bookstore. And you have the added advantage of not hitting your head at the top of the stairs.
Well, I’m always big on making people Christmas stockings. They’re fast, cheap, and easy, even if you don’t sew well. If you don’t sew at all, there’s always Witch-stitch or fusible webbing. I’m partial to using flannel, but you can use any sort of fabric you like that suits the recipient. You need about half a yard for the body of the stocking, then a few inches for the cuff. Or you can trim the edge with ribbon or whatever instead of doing a cuff.
I’m also big on making people Christmas ornaments. Last year I did a lot of bead and wire ornaments, which turned out wonderfully. You can make a ton of cool stuff out of a 97-cent spool of wire and $3 worth of beads. I even made some really cool napkin rings. Salt dough ornaments can turn out really cool, too. You mix 4 parts salt with 1 part flour, then add enough water to make a clay-like mixture. Mold it or roll it out and use cookie cutters, then bake at 350. Paint and varnish, and you’ve got your ornament. Last year I did little dogs and cats and painted them to look like people’s pets. Those were a huge hit.
Also, it’s terribly, terribly easy to make massage oils and salt scrubs for cheap, if you have a ready supply of affordable containers. The massage oils are just regular vegetable oil (you can get other types of unscented oils, but they tend to be a bit pricier), with a few drops of fragrance oil added in. You can get fragrance or essential oils at any craft store for a couple of bucks, and the bottle should last you through a lot of stuff. The salt scrub is just coarse salt (sea salt, or the coarse kosher stuff) mixed with oil and some fragrance oil.
There are also all sorts of recipes out there for making infused cooking oils or vinegars for the foodie on your list.
You can find all sorts of cool and not-very-expensive stuff at the stores on the Hungersite and it’s related websites, and what dollars you spend will go towards charitable causes! I’ve bought CDs, shirts, and some very good Venezuelan coffee from them.
