Once for christmas we made calendars.
We posed silly in them with moth appropriate ‘costumes’.
They were a big hit!
What kinda wing-span did you make relative to your size? 
oh, about 30’.
It took a hell of a lot of crepe paper, lemme tell you!
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When a friend of mine had her first grandchild, I made a scrapbook out of baggies. I know this sounds really dumb, but it is quite a clever idea (I borrowed the idea from another, very arty friend of mine).
Here’s what you do. Find zipper storage bags in a size you like (I used quart size). For my friend’s book, I saved all the emails from a group of our friends responding to her announcement that the Blessed event had finally occurred. Each page was an email. I put shaped confetti in the bags, buttons…any sort of little item that seemed to go with the theme. My arty friend whose idea this originally was, made such a book to remember a trip and used all sorts of tiny souvenirs from her vacation. Once you come up with a theme, the rest is easy. The Dollar Store can be your best friend here, too. Photos are a good thing to include, especially if you are doing a family theme. One page can be a photo and the facing page can be a story about the event commemorated in the photo.
Once you have your pages made, you will want to bind them together. I put an inch wide strip of paper in the bottom of each bag, which helped when I used my hole punch to make two (or three) holes in the bottoms of the bags. I covered heavy cardboard with pretty paper (you could use wrapping paper or even fabric) and punched corresponding holes in the two pieces to form the front and back covers. You can thread ribbon through the holes.
This is a very inexpensive project, very likely no one will ever have seen it before, and you will be giving a gift that will be cherished by the recipient.
Good luck!
I second the calendar idea. That is one of the things that I am doing this unemployed Christmas. I’m going to take 12 pictures of our dogs to Wolf’s or WalMart or some such place to get a calendar made for my boyfriend.
Another idea, if you don’t mind spending just a little bit of money, is TJMaxx or Marshall’s. If you catch them at the right time, they have great housewares and decorating stuff very cheap. I have found very nice Waterford crystal wine glasses/frames/vases there for $10-$15.
If you’ve got access to free pine cones, you can always make scented pine cones. Of course, as noted, dragons are notoriously uncheerful.
Seriously, I think that flavored booze or vinegar would be nice, and fairly cheap.
One of the best food presents is chocolate covered toffee (the crispy kind that crunches when you bite). It requires exactly 1 piece of specialized equipment: a candy thermometer and is made of pretty much just sugar, butter, vanilla. I use a recipe out of Joy of Cooking (I think its for nut brittle but I omit the nuts)
After the candy has cooled you smear melted chocolate on one side, flip and cover the other side. Or break into chunks and dip individually.
There’s a book you can get from the library called ‘The Chocolate Cake Mix Doctor’ which has instructions on making all sorts of impressive things from cake mix. I made some chocolate-orange biscotti one year for my mom which were a big hit (present in large glass jar from dollar store for extra fanciness)
When I’m broke, I draw presents, spending time instead of cash. Unfortunately, this takes a long time, so it’s not something to be done at the last moment.
Lots of really great ideas!
Tapioca - there’s an Oxfam bookshop in Ealing, where my other half lives. We’re in there every weekend
DeVena - I like the cake-in-a-jar idea very much. But how do they eat the cake? Do they just spoon it out?
Today I bought a mosiac kit on sale. It’s a coaster set and I will make that for the in-laws.
Unfortunately, I got my mum flavoured oil last year, so I can’t really do the flavoured-foood thing again.
And as for making cookies - I do that anyway! I always make mince pies and cookies at christmas. But perhaps this year I could put them in a glass jar with a ribbon round it. Then it counts as a gift, right? That’s a good suggestion.
Thanks for the shopping links. I can’t use most of them since I am in the UK, but hopefully someone in the same predicament as me will.
I like the idea of making a nice basket out of things from the dollar (pound) store. I can pretend they cost more than a pound!
There are somethings that you can repackage and make look much more luxurious than their original humble beginnings.
This is especially true of things like bath salts and candies.
Those clear glassein bags and nice ribbons are really your friend here.