Frugal Holiday Gifts

Posted on: November 11, 2008 by Matt

It seems that the holidays are coming up really quickly this year and I have not prepared. I do have some money available for purchasing gifts but would like to find ways to stretch the money I am spending. I know that my girlfriend shares the same situation and has been already browsing around online trying to find some decent deals on gifts.

We also just recently came up with a method to give out personalized gifts at very low cost. Over the past couple months I have been dabbling around with woodburning (otherwise known as pyrography). I had not attempted any significant full sized burns until last Saturday night when I worked on a burn for my girlfriend. My girlfriend is particularly fond of fairies and I happened to track down a pattern that I thought she would like online. I traced it out and showed her the pattern – she liked it but was not too excited so I set it aside for about a month. On Saturday night I opted to pick it back up and burn the pattern into the wood.

I finished the burning and handed it over to her as a gift. She seemed pretty excited by it and asked if she could color it in. I told her it was hers and she could do as she liked. She spent a couple of hours coloring the burning in with colored pencils and nail polish of all things. Then added some form of glitter to various regions of the pattern. The final result was impressive enough that we decided to make a few more burnings together to hand out as holiday gifts to our families. I am really excited about this for a handful of reasons like:

I am going to be burning anyway: I really enjoy woodburning and am learing a lot as I go. If I am going to be burning anyway, why not put it to good use?
We can both enjoy the craft: It is a lot of fun for us to work on a craft like this together. There is not pressure and we can each do the parts of the craft that we enjoy.
The whole family can get involved: We also burned a few small stencil outlines of Christmas themed patterns for the kids to color. We can let the kids turn them into hand made ornaments to give out as gifts or to hang up around the house.
The gift is personal: I suppose a lot can be said for fancy, expensive, commercial, mass-produced gifts that tend to break within a month but I prefer something with a bit of meaning. I think that a gift that we put our time and thoughts into means so much more than some commercial junk.
The price is right: It really does not cost us all that much in materials to make a burning. I currently only have a single temperature wood burner that cost about $30. While I would love a fancy variable temperature tool we can still get by with the tools we have. Basically – we have all the material available and the cost is already sunk as we purchased the wood and burning tool months ago.

In addition to various wood burnings we have also discussed putting together some form of holiday mix in fancy jars for people and doing a mostly hand and home made Christmas for our extended families. We will see how it goes and I look forward to keeping everyone posted on how it turns out. Have any of you had any success with home made Christmas gifts?