And now you are probably wondering if I have lost my ever loving mind… but I manage to give thoughtful, often handmade, gifts to a fairly large family every year without having a huge budget or being unusually organized.
Do you ever wonder how your crafty friends find the time to handmake so many things for the holidays? If I am being entirely honest, yes some of them are speed demons who start around the same time everyone else starts Christmas shopping. I am not one of those. I am not by nature an overly organized person, but after a couple of “Surprise! Life happened and there is no budget for Christmas presents anymore!” years, I figured out that whether I was planning to make or buy our presents, it was a lot easier to manage in small doses throughout the year.
Even if you happily buy everything on your list, this method still makes the holidays so much more relaxing! You have the chance to shop sales and to spread out the money you spend. If you are making any of the things you now have all year to leisurely choose patterns, shop materials, craft in your spare time, or even grow extras in your garden!
So, how much work is this early planning? Depends on what your goals are. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than your regular shopping list. I start out by writing down who I want to give gifts to and then leave space to brainstorm as many present ideas as I can come up with for each person. (Our immediate family is fairly large so I do a parallel list of birthdays at the same time.)
If you have a shorter list you can probably tackle each person one on one. If you have a longer list, this way lies madness. I have two main ways of simplifying this; grouping and gift baskets.
What do I mean by grouping? Say this year I am planning to give gifts to 6 children. Instead of thinking up 6 separate ideas, I think of one or two broader ideas that I can personalize. I might decide that I am giving them books, and then pick books based on their interests. I might make them a blanket and then pick their favorite colour, or match their rooms. This is often really fun since most of the kids on my list are family and like having something that their cousins got too, but is uniquely theirs at the same time.
The other trick that has worked well is doing family baskets at Christmas time. This is kind of just a fancy version of grouping, but it has been really worth the effort! I find that it simplifies a lot of the decision making. I make a basket that has similar things in it for each set of parents and each sibling’s family. I am careful to make sure that each family member will like some of what is inside.
I will write a bit more about baskets next week, and some gift ideas later on, but for now start thinking about who would be on your gift giving list and what sort of things you truly enjoy making. Isn’t it nice that there is no rush?