Homemade Holiday Gifts
I’m a horribly uncreative person (btw, I just googled “uncreative” to make sure it’s a real word, and the definition is “not being or productive of something fresh and unusual”… sounds harsh, right?). I desperately want to original, to be one of those people who can look at a piece of cardboard and somehow whip up an adorable and inspired something, but I’m just not. Usually when I attempt some project it comes out looking cheap, plus I have messy handwriting, making it look worse.
Every holiday I’m determined – determined, I tell you! – to make something adorable. This year, I got smart and decided just to copy other people’s stuff and viola! I created adorable.
Above is the limoncello that’s going to 3 co-workers for the holidays. Below are mason jars going to another group of colleagues; I made a chai tea mix for some, and hot cocoa mix for the rest.
(and the awesome gift tags? also copied!)
The first idea was for the limoncello, because I have a few co-workers that love infused alcohols as much as I do. The recipe comes from one of my favorite blogs, Shutterbean, and can be found here.
Since not all of my colleagues have a thing for vodka, I searched out other ideas. The chai came from thekitchn, and here’s where you can find it. I doubled the recipe, ending up with 19 tea bags (rather than giving them loose tea, I filled up individual tea bags using these, which I just happened to have). I tried one teabag and was amazed (and thrilled!) to discover that it tasted exactly like chai.
Finally, I found a recipe for homemade hot cocoa that sounded pretty delicious, from the brown eyed baker, and figured that would round everything out. I tried that, too, and found it to be pretty yummy.
I will say, as I drove around to 3 different grocery stores buying all the supplies, I got a little nervous that I’d decided to make too many things – I like to do that, too, and then not have enough time to finish it all – but all three recipes were very simple, so it turned out fine.
I picked up a flat of mason jars from the grocery, and couldn’t resist buying the glass flasks from Sur La Table (I couldn’t find them online, but they were $6 each in the store. A bit pricy!)
My favorite part, though, are the tags. I found this amazing website, eatdrinkchic, and she has these holiday tags that are free and downloadable.
Since my handwriting isn’t super neat, I also bought standard mailing labels and printed the instructions for each gift, sticking the labels to the back of the tags. Here’s the ones I made for the limoncello.
And there you have it!
December 18, 2011
This entry was posted in gifts, holidays and tagged chai tea, gift ideas, holidays, hot cocoa, limoncello.
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