Home Made Gifts for the Holidays

This year we had a tight budget for Christmas - a tricky situation when one is fortunate enough to have a pretty big group of friends and family! (Not that I'm complaining!) So, we decided to set ourselves an approximate budget of ten dollars per person, and make tasty gifts for people. The result? Two kinds of cookies and Swedish Christmas vodka!

We infused the vodka with brown sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and orange. We went to a second hand store and picked out five different and interesting bottles to put the vodka in. Then we washed them, plugged them with various corks and red stoppers, and gave each a bow!

Here I am decorating the sugar cookies!

We went to Michael's and bought Christmas baking gift bag sets - they were really easy to use and ended up looking great! They each came with cardboard circles for the cookies to rest on, cellophane bags, red ribbons, and cute little to/from tags. Each bag contained some simple sugar cookies as well as my favorite, chocolate chip button cookies!

I went to the Bay and bought some little ornaments (on sale) and attached them to a few of the bags. Buying ornaments, and attaching them to gifts is something that I have been doing at Christmas time for a few years now. I always go to the Hudson Bay Company during the week leading up to Christmas; they always have a great selection of ornaments at that time of year and they're always marked down (usually $1 - $2 per ornament!).

I also thought I would share this photo of our apartment, decorated for Christmas! And of course, what blog post of mine wouldn't be complete without a complimentary cat photo?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

-Jackie