I’ve been talking a little bit lately about the gifts I’ve been preparing for my friends this holiday. It’s a tight year for me so I thought I’d go the homemade route to save some money. I also didn’t want to spend much because I have a feeling my efforts won’t be reciprocated. While I give the gifts because I want to and it makes me happy, it still hurts when you don’t get anything (no matter how small) back from your friends. The holidays are always a bittersweet time for me. One day I hope that I won’t have to be the one to initiate the thoughtful gift-giving tradition and I can be pleasantly surprised by a thoughtful someone. (I don’t care if you think I’m selfish, if you knew the history behind my feelings you would understand)

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I wanted to show everyone what my months of labour and planning came to! I finished all the gifts a week or two ago but haven’t gotten around to assembling the post for a while.

My idea was to give each girl a gift basket filled with delicious. In the summer, I spent a couple weekends picking, preparing and canning local fruits and veggies. I picked organic pears from a friend’s yard, organic plums from my very own plum tree, and some pickling cucumbers from a local farmer’s market. I prepared them all in syrup or brine and they’ve been “soaking” for the past couple of months, and should be ready to eat for the holidays.

I also made up a batch of apple butter in my crockpot which I canned.

Each person is getting a canned fruit or pickle, a jar of apple butter, some homemade treats and a tree ornament or necklace; all re-gifted but totally nice.

The treats were originally going to be supercool, elaborate things, but then reality struck. I didn’t have a lot of the tools, ingredients or know-how to pull off a lot of the stuff I wanted to do without a trial run, so I had to simplify.

In the end, I made:

Chocolate-covered nuts & bolts mix (Nestle sent me some Tollhouse chocolate chips so that saved me some cost!) and candy-cane bark (Thanks Amy!)

I also tried out a recipe FB recommended for hot chocolate on a stick! It sure was an interesting experience, but here’s how it turned out:

I had a lot of fun figuring out how to pack everything up and make it pretty in a frugal sort of way. I love doing this stuff and it is really easy to go overboard and buy all the really nice materials… but I tried to operate within a budget and got all the trappings at the dollar store, if you can believe it! I don’t think it looks too bad.

Here is the first set of treat bags I put together:

And 3 of the gifts almost done (just had to wrap the baskets in cellophane. The tote bag I got from the Flare party and one friend said she really liked it so I thought it would be a good way for me to unclutter while making her happy!):

Here’s a closeup of one of the baskets:

And that’s that! I made a total of 4 baskets, one of which I had already given away at the time I took these photos. In that one I included a bottle of my homemade vanilla extract because out of all my friends, I knew she would appreciate it and use it the most!

As for costs, if I don’t count the costs for the canned items, it works out to about $12-13 per person which is pretty reasonable. But a LOT of work went into these baskets and I just hope they appreciate that! I would normally do a better job on presentation and wrapping, but I was getting flustered at the time and just wanted everything to get done. When I have more time I’m sure they will all see my proper wrapping skills in the future 🙂

Now, I have some photos of the processes and such for a couple of the recipes I used and I thought I might post them later on. Would any of yall be interested if I did that? Maybe some of you can give these recipes a shot!