What are some good homeade gift ideas? (Only have a small amount of money to work with for Christmas gifts)?

Answer 1

I like to give homemade sweet breads for Christmas. They are not near as sweet as all those cookies and candies everyone is pigging out on over the holidays, and your recipient can have a slice or two for breakfast! They are also pretty darn easy to make. You can buy inexpensive miniture foil baking pans at Walmart/K-Mart/Target/etc. So your gifts will look pretty without all that extra hoopla. And you can give out two/three mini loaves of different kinds. Or one large loaf, as you choose. Another positive thing about the breads...they freeze and thaw very easily and taste just as good after frozen! Especially if you wrap them in cellophane. So your friends/family can enjoy them after the holidays if they are currently running on a sugar overload!! You can find easy recipes on-line for banana bread, date bread, lemon-poppy seed bread, pumpkin bread, ginger bread, walnut bread, orange marmelade bread....the list goes on and on. The ingredients are usually pretty inexpensive, and if you really want to go all out, you could include a small tub of homemade honey-butter. (One stick of real butter warmed to room temperature whipped together with 2 tbsp. honey.) A real impressive, easy to make gift!! And if you have a lot of gifts to give, you can do a lot of little mini-loaves at once!! Hope this helps!!

Answer 2

We made home-made nuts & bolts one time. Everyone loved them. We mixed in the roaster 4 cups of shreddies, 4 cups of cherrios, 4 cups of rice chex, 4 cups of pretzel sticks, 3 T. butter, 1 T worchestershire sauce, 1/2 T garlic powder. Then bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Take from oven and add lots of mixed nuts then return to oven and bake a further 10 minutes. Let cool well then spoon into old, clean preserving jars. Decorate the jars with Christmas stickers and wrap a christmas ribbon around the neck and voila, it's a gift. Actually makes enough for a dozen gifts.

Answer 3

Make up a batch of "Friendship Tea"
2 c. sugar
1 c. iced tea mix(unsweetend)
14 oz. Tang
1 3 oz. pkg. Wyler's lemonade
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Mix and store in an air tight container. Mix 2 heaping tsp. to a cup of hot water.

You could buy a few cute jars and fill them with the tea mix. Make a little Friendship tag with directions and get a coffee mug to go with each jar, wrap the two together and a nice little gift.

Trail mixes are also easy
Popped corn
peanuts
raisins
pretzels
m&ms
granola
sunflower seeds

Mix together and find cute xmas bags or containers to pkg. it in.

How about some Cinnamon Ornaments?
3/4 c. cinnamon
1 T. ground allspice
2 T. ground cloves
1 T. nutmeg
1 c applesauce

Mix well. Put in between waxed paper and roll no less than 1/4". Use cookie cutters to cut into desired shapes or roll into balls for apples or pumpkins.(Use whole cloves for them stems.) Poke holes with tooth picks to make ornaments. Dry cut outs flat, it takes about 2 days.

for the sweet tooth-
Layered Candies in a Jar
Layer candies into a wide mouthed jar. Select 4 or 5 candies of different colors and put i even amounts of each. One combination suggestion is:
M&M's
gumdrops
jellybeans
candy corn

Answer 4

Oh wow the best gifts are the ones home made!

What does your family like to eat? I made éclairs one year. Of course I was so sick of them by the time I got done that everyone got there fill and I just watched lol!
In my sisters small town where we had Christmas that year, the garbage guys took some of the éclairs instead of payment to haul everything away for us :0)

Cream puffs go over big here as well, and easy to make.
German Pancakes, banana bread, jellies/jams, all go over great. Cookies even go over here!

This is just the food, which we are in cooking & recipes. If you have the time to make a cross stitch picture, or if you no how to crochet? Go to the craft store (I can spend hours there lol). Things there do not cost much, only thing that one needs is a creative mind :0)

Hope this helps some?

Answer 5

Homemade cookies, spiced tea, homemade candy, a basket with recipes and homemade items, you can look up recipes for bubble bath you can make and give as gifts. A collage of pictures of friends and family, or make a christmas card and put coupons in the card for things you will do to help out, like clean the house, babysit, grocery shop, all kinds of chores. Good luck.

Answer 6

This is what I did last year, and it works pretty well:

What you need:

1) Glass ornaments ($4 from Walmart for 12)
2) Glass paint: black, orange, clear, blue ($2 ea.)
3) Decorative marbles ($2 from Walmart for about 50; you often see them used in the bottom of fish tanks)
4) Hot glue and hot glue gun

Steps:
A) Separate the marbles into groups of 12
B) Hot glue the marbles onto the ornaments in stacks of three.

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C) Paint black dots on the middle marble, give the top marble an orange carrot nose and two black eyes, and paint a black top hat above the marbles. Repeat this to all of the snowmen.
(NOTE: unless you have tips for the paints, it'll be tough to make the carrot. I learned to place a dot of orange in the middle of the top marble and use a toothpick to drag it out to create the triangle shape)

D) When everything is dry (think: 24 hours), put the blue and clear paint and swirl around the ornament. This will take a few days since you can't do it all at once (DOH! Spheres!), but once it dries it will look awesome.

Basically it will look like a snow storm surrounding a cute little snowman. :-)

----Or------

Get some canning jars, left over pieces of fabric, and old recipes.

Gather all the ingredients, sans the wet ones (i.e. water, eggs, tomatoes, sauces, soups, etc), and layer the ingredients on top of each other.

Place a piece of fabric (2 x 2" is a usual size) over the mouth of the jar, place the lid on, and include the recipe to send to someone!

You can do this for cookies, cakes, soups, etc.

-------Or-------
Grab cheap Christmas tins from Walmart/Hobby Lobby/etc, wash them, and place different cheeses, meats, or cookies in there.

Answer 7

You'll probably think this is a bit silly but I'm in the same situation as you & only have a small amount of money for christmas but I'm thinking of making my dad a huge batch of cheese scones because he loves them & buy a big bag of his favourite sweets & buy a nice pot for him to keep his sweets in. I know its not a flamboyant idea but I know he'll still like it a lot.

Every year I also make my own christmas cards, gift labels & thank you notes because that also saves a lot of money.

Answer 8

home baked chocolate chip cookies, yum !

buy the ziplock type containers square works best- in the grocery store, and decorate the lids with bows, christmas paper, etc. Hot glue ( low heat) jewels on the bottom of container, or use glitter glue.

Make a cute homemade tag, put your to: from: on one side and us one big enough with the recipe printed on the reverse side of the tag. I use the colored saran wrap in betwee the layers of cookies.
ps. oatmeal cookies are very inexpensive to make !

Answer 9

Food in a pretty container is the most affordable gift...
Go to Google search and put in recipies for Christmas....

Answer 10

Bake some sugar cookies or nanimo bars or your favorite Christmas treat, put them into the plastic Christmas containers, the stick a big bow on it. Good luck to you