Christmas Gift Giving Without Spending Money

Christmas is just around the corner and you are flat broke. There are so many gifts to give. People you really want to pamper, but you don't have the money to buy decent gifts for everyone. So what do you do?

Well, you can make your own gifts.

1. The Pet Rock

Remember the pet rock craze? You can make little pets out or rocks easily.

Just take a large, smooth pebble. Stick on a pair of eyes. Glue some felt below. Write a message on the felt and you have a personalized Christmas gift.

2. Cookies

Are you good at baking?

Well go bake several batches of cookies using your best cookie recipes. Do a variety of cookies. Then decorate them. Some with M&Ms some with icing sugar, some with nuts, others with raisins.

Put them into little plastic bags. A few of each type of cookie in each bag. Tie the bag with a pretty ribbon. Make small, pretty cards and write a personal message on each of them. Stick the cards to the outside of that bag of cookies. Each bag of cookies makes a delightful gift for Christmas.

3. Flower gifts

Do you have a garden? Do you live near a place where wild flowers grow abundantly?

If you can pick some flowers, you can make pressed flower bookmarks. I used to do those as a kid. You arrange the flowers on a piece of white blotting paper. Put another piece of blotting paper over the flowers and put heavy books over the blotting paper to press the flowers for a few weeks. Once dried and flattened, these flowers can be glued onto book marks, photo frames and anything you might want to give as a decorative gift.

4. Handmade jewelry

You can make jewelry for the women in your family using wooden beads or even paper clips. Bracelets and necklaces are the easiest to make as all you have to do is to string the beads up and tie the loose ends together. Use a strong elastic cord for the beads so the bracelet is stretchable and can be put on or taken off easily. As for paper clips, with a pair of tweezers and some cheap plastic beads, you can make attractive paper clip earrings.

5. Are you good at crafts like crochet?

You can make an adorable bookworm bookmark. Start off with the long string part of the bookmark. Just to simple chain stich using thick wool thread until you have a 15 inch long crochet chain. Then do 3 treble crochet stitches into each chain stitch for the last 30 chains. It would curl up into a cute curly bookworm. Stick on 2 eyes on the head and make a tassle at the other end of the chain. Once you get the hang of it, you could make these bookmarks in colorful wool to give away as Christmas gifts.

Need more gift making ideas? Check out http://www.womanht.com/diy/gifts.htm for do it yourself gifts you might want to make from Christmas. A great way to give personal gifts without spending a bomb.

Besides making your Christmas gifts, you can get pretty impressive gifts by spending time instead of money. http://www.christmas-giftshop.com/freechristmasgifts.htm shows you where you pay for the gift by participating in surveys, instead of forking out money. If you are worried that your loved ones know that is a free gift, then go for the free gift card offers. Use the gift cards to buy Christmas gifts and no one would be any wiser.

About The Author
Janice Wee is the webmaster of http://www.christmas-giftshop.com.

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