Last Minute Christmas: Holiday Treats

grapefruit marmalade and blueberry lime jam, blogged by me here

lemon coconut bread from Baked Bree

Are you a little short on funds and time this year and still need Christmas presents? Bake up some treats for the people you love! Just take a little extra time to package them up carefully and they'll look sophisticated and make lovely gifts. I've compiled a few recipes that will look elegant when simply wrapped up with a bow or placed in a tin, and arranged them according to skill level/time. After they taste the treats, people are sure to ask for the recipe, so write it down on a index card and hole punch the corner so you can thread your ribbon through it before you tie it onto your gift.
These are just suggestions some to get you thinking. I like to try find recipes that use interesting combinations of flavors and are something that the recipient might not have tried before, but you could use old family favorites or whatever you like. Don't feel confined to cookies... quick bread or yeast breads, jams and jellies, pickled items, and candies are all surprisingly easy to make and would make wonderful gifts. All of these recipes can be made at least a week ahead.
Stay tuned for the next Last Minute Christmas post with gift and crafting tutorials.

Christmas time!

All you need are candy canes, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, pom poms, and a hot glue gun.

All last night I had dreams about making Christmas decorations with Martha Stewart. It was the best dream ever. I've already made some candy cane reindeer over the weekend. They're so easy and great to stick on the tree, give away to people you know but don't know enough to give them anything for Christmas, and tie on to Christmas presents. I'm currently working on making some stockings today. I was trying to wrap up some Christmas presents yesterday and realized I didn't have any wrapping paper or paper bags, so I thought the only logical thing to do was to make everyone a stocking to put their presents in instead. This makes total sense, right? It's slow going for the first one because I'm still trying to figure out exactly how one goes about making a stocking, but hopefully the next two are faster.

 These mini wallets are also great for small Christmas gifts. You can put all of your gift cards in them so you have them in your purse but they aren't crowding your wallet. How many times have you forgotten your gift card at the house when you were at the store? I do that all the time. I always forget I have gift cards. I will be making a tutorial on how to make these wallets in the next few days, and will make a big post for a bunch of last minute Christmas crafting ideas.

Left to right: homemade marshmallows, caramel corn, almond toffee, chocolate and French sea salt caramels

The post will also contain links to recipes. Having such a big family, I used to just make them cookies or candies for Christmas and put them in nice tins. You can find tins just about everywhere, and they normally don't cost more than two bucks. You could also try your luck at a thrift shop and see if you can find any nice vintage tins. The tins look like a lot of work, but they're great if you have tons of people to give gifts to and not a whole lot of money. Just make a few batches of different candies or cookies and distribute them throughout all the tins. They'll think they're getting spoiled with all the different goodies. Christmas is coming up fast, and if you're like me you've left everything to the last minute. Hopefully my next post will help out just in time.

Procrastinating

I've lost my point and shoot camera (or, rather, I'm too lazy to look around for it) so the past two entries have been with cell phone pictures. Hopefully this will change soon.

I have my American Literature and Calculus finals tomorrow and I have zero motivation to study for them right now. All I want to do is listen to my Christmas with The Rat Pack cd and start on my Christmas presents. At this point the system is one hour crafting, and one hour studying. On one of my allotted hours last night, I made these little toys for my dog for Christmas. I saw them here, but since Jenny over at Allsorts (which is a fantastic and inspirational craft blog that I encourage you to check out if you're interested in that stuff) was all sold out, I made my own. I used leftover fuzzy fabric from cat beds I made a year or so ago, with cute Christmas cat fabric by Robert Kaufman that I bought a fat quarter of a long time ago. I put leftover squeakers in each one and took apart an old pillow to stuff them with. And viola! My first present done and I didn't have to spend a dime. Rocky is older and only cares about cleaning his toys now, so he'll have fun with the silky soft faux fur and I won't have to worry about him destroying it on the first night. Hopefully Santa will bring us a puppy so Rocky can have someone to share his presents with. (hint hint)

A Very Vintage Christmas

O tannen bonbon, originally uploaded by boopsie.daisy.

I inherited my love of vintage and kitsch from my mom, who has a truly envious collection off vintage Christmas ornaments and other knickknacks. Now that I've grown up, moved away, and am trying to get a handle on this whole "being an adult" thing, it's up to me to start to build my own collection.
Growing up, we would each pick out one new ornament a year to add to the tree, which we always got from my uncle's tree farm. My cousins and I used to playwork on the farm (my cousin Katie and I were mainly on hot cocoa duty while the boys helped cut down trees), and I can't tell you how many times we tried to shove each other through the tree bagger (a shoot and funnel type thing that put netting around the tree) the first year my uncle got it. It didn't matter how pretty our tree looked all decorated up, and believe me, most of the time it was a "so ugly it's cute" kind of tree, each of the ornaments was special.
Last year was my first Christmas since I moved away from home and I got the first ornament for my very own collection. My dad's neighbor hosts an annual ornament swap, which I thought was a really cute idea, in a kind of Yankee swap fashion. At the end of the whole thing, I think I ended up with some weird metal star or cross thing. Either way, it really wasn't my style, so my dad traded me for his glittery frog ornament, which is still pretty weird, but at least it's my kind of tacky. So now every year I'm going to have a giant sparkly frog on my tree. Maybe when I get more ornaments I'll be able to kind of hide it in the back or something. This year I have my sights set on a cute orange kitty in a santa hat.

Growing up is kind of bittersweet. While I miss being able to make candy cane reindeers and watch the Rankin and Bass stop motion Christmas movies (which are still some of my favorite movies ever) with my mom, I look forward to being able to share all of the Christmas traditions with the family of my own that I'll create some day.

After the link are a few inspirational Christmas pictures that I found on flickr.