Up until January, I had a wonderful job where I handled all of the IT needs for a small company in our area. At the end of last year, the company was sold and the jobs were folded together with another company with the “redundant” jobs being eliminated, and mine was redundant. Since then I have been looking for work without much success and I’ve been working at a local McDonalds.

Christmas is coming and we don’t have much money to buy gifts for our kids. Basically, we have almost nothing at all. I have no idea what to do. My Christmases growing up were wonderful. What can I do to make this Christmas wonderful?

This letter really hit home for me.

There’s a family in my life that’s gone through a very similar situation. In this family, the parents were facing unemployment for most of a year while raising two pre-teen girls. They struggled mightily with their finances, but at the end of the year, they still had the things that mattered. Namely, they had a wonderful family where there was obvious mutual love and care.

The first thing to remember is that no family is perfect. There is no such thing as perfection. It is really easy to look back to the past and see the holidays as this perfect time, particularly when you’re re-examining childhood memories.

When I think back to my childhood Christmases, they were wonderful times, but I can also see that they were not perfect. My father was laid off from his job during multiple Christmases and I had a few members of my extended family who consumed excessive alcohol and made the holidays rather … uncomfortable.

Those negative elements did not make my childhood Christmases into a negative experience. What I remember now are all of the good things. I remember time spent with my grandmother and great-grandmother when they were still living (and quite active). I remember the incredible excitement of the time leading up to Christmas and the wonderful feeling of waking up early on Christmas morning.

Here’s the thing: aside from perhaps one present each year, I don’t really remember the presents at all. There are many Christmases where I cannot recall a single gift I received.

Even as a child, I realized on a very deep level that Christmas wasn’t really about the presents at all, and I’m pretty confident given the tone of your email that your children are similarly thoughtful.

As a parent, it’s important to keep in mind that Christmas really, truly isn’t about the presents. If your worry with regards to the “perfect” Christmas involves having great gifts under the tree, that should be pretty low on your priority list.

In fact, if I were in your shoes, I would try out one of these things this Christmas.

One option would be to mutually agree to forego Christmas presents within your family. Talk about this together as a family. (This does not mean that Santa couldn’t leave a gift for each child, but it would mean that there wouldn’t be other presents.) Talk about the abundance of things that you already have and question whether or not you need more things. Make it into a discussion about what Christmas is really all about with your kids.

Hand in hand with that, you could spend Christmas Day voluntering as a family. Look for a soup kitchen or a food pantry to work at. Almost all of these charities are open on Christmas Day because quite a few families actually do this, and they always have things that need done.

You can carry that even further by doing what we call “reverse Christmas-ing.” Instead of getting presents, all you do is give them on Christmas Day. For example, you could spend a few weeks as a family beforehand doing a small canned goods drive and then donate all that you’ve collected on Christmas Day. Thanksgiving is a great time to jump-start such an effort.

Another option (if you truly don’t like the gift-free route) is to make gifts. Simply have everyone in the family make something for everyone else in the family. If you don’t have a skill that you can use here, learn one. It’s okay if the other person knows what you’re making – in fact, it can make for some great family evenings throughout December.

No ideas here? Learn how to knit or crochet so you can make a sweater or a scarf. Learn how to cook so you can make a big batch of someone’s favorite cookies. Work hard on creating a nice piece of art, then frame it so it can be hung in someone’s room (this is a great one for kids to make for parents). The supplies for these items do not cost very much. The real investment here is thought and time.

Yet another option is to select one gift as a family for the whole family to enjoy. Sit down and think about the things you enjoy doing together as a family, then talk about one item that would improve one of those experiences. Then, purchase that item, wrap it up, let the children open it on Christmas morning, then spend part of the day utilizing that item (if possible).

There’s one big thing worth noticing here. Everything on this list involves time spent with your family. In the end, that is what matters about Christmas.

If you’re worried that your kids will be disappointed by fewer presents under the tree (or none at all)… well, they might be. It’s a disappointment that won’t last very long, though, if you are actively spending time together and building a strong bond with them. It’s that bond that will last, not concern about what was or wasn’t under a tree in your living room one morning.

The post Christmas Worries appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

So, what can we do about it? Here are some options to consider. I have used all of these at various points.

Plain brown paper This is an old standby, of course. It creates a classic look for packages (“little brown packages tied up with string…”). You can easily jazz it up a bit with a stamp and some ink, covering the paper with little red candy canes or other festive shapes.

How can I get this inexpensively? The easiest way is to just request paper bags at the grocery store. Most grocery stores will bag your groceries in brown paper bags upon request. Then, when you’re home, save the bags. When you’re ready to wrap, just cut off the bottom of the bag, cut a single slice through the side of the bag, then flip it over so that the bag labeling is on the inside of the package.

Newspaper When I was growing up, many of my relatives would give gifts wrapped in the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper. They’d just save them throughout the year and use them as their gift wrapping for all gifts. I actually thought it was incredibly cool at the time, especially since the relatives that did it usually gave interesting gifts. When I was in college, one friend of mine would wrap all of his gifts in old issues of The Onion that he’d get from his parents.

How can I get this inexpensively? There are lots of ways to get free or discounted newspapers. For instance, one local gas station will give away old newspapers if someone is willing to take them, so I would often get the Sunday paper for free there early on Monday morning (for the coupon flyers, if nothing else). You can also keep an eye on recycling bins or else pick up copies of the local free newspaper.

Themed magazines A few years back, I started saving old magazine covers for a project. I simply asked some friends if I could have their old unwanted magazines and saved the covers from them.

When it came time to wrap gifts, I took covers from magazines associated with the gift itself and used it for the wrapping paper. For books, I used things like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. For CDs, I used covers of Rolling Stone. For an article of clothing that I gave to a female, I used a fashion magazine (I think it was W). For a piece of sporting equipment, I used Sports Illustrated.

How can I get this inexpensively? Tell your friends that you’re working on a project and you’d love to have any old magazines they have laying around. You’ll be surprised how many magazines come out of the woodwork if you ask. Then, just save the covers from them throughout the year and try to associate them with some of the gifts you’re giving.

Children’s drawings If you happen to have an excess of children’s art, this can make a perfect wrapping paper for gifts for the child’s grandparents or doting aunts or uncles. I can certainly say that we have an excess of children’s art around our home.

How can I get this inexpensively? If you have a child in preschool or elementary school, chances are you’re going to wind up with more art than you know what to do with. Just save some of the more charming pieces (that you’re willing to part with) and use them to wrap gifts.

Plan ahead If none of these really appeal to you, the best way to inexpensively wrap gifts is to simply plan ahead – way ahead. Just after Christmas, wrapping paper is usually on deep discount at department stores, so that’s the best time to buy yourself an abundance of the stuff.

How can I get this inexpensively? Take a bit of time to buy some paper between Christmas and New Years and stow it away in a closet for next year. Problem solved.

The post Wrapping Paper Alternatives appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Here are the homemade gift items we covered in the series:
Vanilla extract
Homemade soap
Caramel apple jam
Homemade beer
Wine jelly
Meals in a jar
Crocheted hat and scarf
Personalized cards and stationery
Handmade ornaments
Homemade cookies and gift bundling
Photo cubes

That’s our collection of completed gifts. A few of them (some of the beer and a few of the jars) had already been given as gifts when we took this picture.

As you can see, we made quite a bit of everything. The handmade greeting cards are the one thing that’s not very visible here – they’re in the white boxes near the back of the picture, with white ribbon (which I’ll show again below).

Beer and ornaments

As you can see, we made custom labels for the beer, depicting me with a Santa hat drinking a pint. We entitled the beer “Nit Wit,” mostly as a self-deprecating joke but also because the type of beer we made is a witbier.

Since we were reconstituting six pack boxes for this, we simply took extra Nit Wit labels and affixed them to the side of the carriers.

Also, something worth noting with the homemade ornaments: we’re using a ribbon to attach them to some of the jam, jelly, soup, and brownie mix jars that we’re giving as gifts.

Vanilla and mailing

We found some food-safe jars for the vanilla from an old friend who had extra jars from a food laboratory that were never going to get used. They hold eight ounces of liquid with screw tops.

For them, we made up labels entitled “Super Joe’s Super Homemade Vanilla Extract” (referring to our oldest son’s superhero alter ego).

A few of our gifts are traveling through the mail. For those, we’re packing up the soup in Ziploc bags so that they’ll ship easily.

Handmade cards

For the greeting cards, we wrapped each bundle (we made two bundles of 38 cards each) in tissue paper as you can see above, then sealed each bundle with a small snowflake sticker.

We then put these bundles into small garment boxes, closed the boxes, and wrapped some red ribbon around them, creating an understated look.

This was actually my favorite packaging of all of the gifts we made.

Soap

As we had a wide variety of soap sizes (including some “ball” soaps, which are something of a part of soapmaking tradition), we packaged them in different ways, as you can see above. Three soap balls make a cute little snowman!

Around each soap bundle, we wrapped a small piece of paper entitled “Princess Katie’s Handmade Castille Soap” (after our daughter).

We actually ended up with a lot of these, so there are many people who are getting two or even three bars of this soap as a gift.

Final thoughts
My wife, Sarah, deserves a lot of credit for helping all of these gifts reach completion. Some of the gifts were largely her project (like the scarves). Others were almost entirely my project (like the greeting cards). Others required both of our efforts (like the jams and jellies).

In any case, these gifts were made as a team, and without working together, we would have never been able to complete so many gifts.

The post Homemade Gift Series: Wrap-Up (Both Literally and Otherwise) appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Why didn’t I want to do a post about it? More than the other gifts in the series, Sarah and I both feel that these gifts will be cherished by the recipients. So, yesterday, I contacted the recipients and asked them to not read The Simple Dollar for a few days – I know the recipients, and I’m quite sure they won’t if I ask them not to.

So, what did we make?

We made photo cubes (or, in our case, not quite cubes – I’ll explain below) for home decoration use or paperweight use! The cubes are made out of cedar, though most woods would also work easily for them.

We got the idea from this post at the wonderful alphamom blog and more or less followed the procedure outlined there. I’ll reiterate it here, with some details on our own experiences.

I should note that in the below procedure, I’m often stating “we” for tasks both Sarah and I did individually. She put forth quite a lot of effort during the making of these cubes; in fact, I’d easily say she handled most of the work here, particularly in terms of putting more coats of Mod Podge on the cubes throughout the day.

What You Need
The materials you need are largely straightforward.

A cube-shaped block of wood – or two, or three
Sandpaper
Six photographs
Mod Podge
A sponge paint brush
A spray sealant for the finish (to prevent tackiness from the Mod Podge)

On acquiring the wood cubes We went to Home Depot, selected a cedar 4″ by 4″, and asked them to cut the board every four inches, making (theoretically) 4″ x 4″ x 4″ cubes. I should note here that we tried both Home Depot and Lowe’s for this purpose – the people at Lowe’s wouldn’t cut the board to our specifications and basically acted as though we were a bother, while the staff at Home Depot were very helpful.

The problem with this cut is that the cubes didn’t turn out to be perfectly 4″ x 4″ x 4″. After cutting, the cedar had dried and shrunk a small amount, so we ended up with blocks that measured about 3.5″ x 3.5″ x 4″.

We had two choices at this point: we could either shave 1/2″ off of one end of each cube or we could simply go with the slightly rectangular blocks. Our decision was made after mocking up a few of them – we decided to go with the oblong ones. We found that the slightly askew blocks made for much more interesting stacking possibilities if done in multiples.

If you want cubes, ask for a tape measure to measure the 4″ x 4″ before they cut it for you. Make sure that it actually measures 4″ by 4″.

On acquiring the Mod Podge, sponge brush, and spray sealant I went to a local Hobby Lobby intending to just pick up the Mod Podge and the brush, but the person there seemed fascinated with the project. She warned me that the Mod Podge might wind up being slightly tacky when we were finished, and she suggested a clear spray-on finishing spray that would eliminate the tackiness.

Both Hobby Lobby and Michael’s were very helpful during our various homemade gift projects. I never went away from either store with disappointment with their prices, product selection, or customer service.

Choosing Photographs
Choosing the photographs made for an interesting experience, too.

We decided to make photo cubes themed around our children. In the example above, for instance, we’ve chosen pictures for a cube full of pictures of our daughter.

Now, it’s easy to choose 4″ x 6″ snapshots of your target that are wonderful pictures on their own, but you quickly begin to realize that when you’re cropping them down to fit on the face of a cube, you’re shaving off a lot of the context of the picture. This can quickly make wonderful shots unusable or greatly reduce the likeability of the shot.

In other words, when you’re choosing snapshots for such a cube, choose ones that have a lot of potential space to crop away. If a photo is filled with your target, it’s not going to work for a cube face unless you shrink it down to the cube’s size.

If you do as we did, which involved selecting photographs out of a big box of prints, this is a really important factor to think about, and considering it up front will save you some effort in finding great pictures that work on cube faces.

Making the Cubes

As is often the case with projects like this, we put the cubes together during a family arts and crafts session, in which the children were making their own projects at the same time (hence the colorful doodles next to the cubes above).

We used scissors to trim the photos down to an appropriate size for each cube face. This was more of a process of repeated trimming and comparing to the various faces of the cube until it looked appropriate.

At the same time, the cube faces were a bit rough, so we sanded them down a bit. The faces themselves do not need to be perfectly smooth as they will be covered with photos, but the edges should be smoothed down to a nice rounded edge, depending on how exactly you want your cube to look.

The photographs were attached to the cubes using Mod Podge that was allowed to dry. This worked very well for directly attaching the photos.

Typically, we attached three photos, allowed them to dry, then attached the other three photos. This enabled us to not have to sit a drying photo on the bottom side of the cube, which might have caused uneven drying or warping (better safe than sorry).

After the photos were attached, we gave three faces of the cube a coating of Mod Podge. When you first put the Mod Podge on, it’ll look like you just coated the face with something white and it’ll look frighteningly bad.

Just wait. It will dry clear and look glossy.

We applied three coats to each face of the cube. We would coat three faces, let it dry, rotate the block, then coat three more faces and allow those faces to dry. Repeat that procedure three times and you have a finished cube.

Usually, we had several cubes going at the same time, so we would put another coat on several cubes all at once and let them dry all at once. Honestly, if you’re going through the effort of making one cube, the additional effort to make more is much less – the leap from one to two cubes is much less than the effort for just one cube.

After we had three coats on it, we sprayed the cubes with a clear finishing spray so that they wouldn’t be sticky over long periods. If the cubes are stacked, for example, we don’t want them to become stuck together in a tower.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, remember you can make cubes of any theme you’d like. Friends have suggested cubes made up of your favorite sports team (perhaps using cropped baseball cards), cubes of the home where you and the person you’re giving the cube to grew up or spent time together when you were younger, cubes depicting a trip taken together, or so on.

If you know of a person’s passion or something they care about deeply and that can be represented visually, you probably have what you need to make a photo cube for them that will touch their heart.

In a few days, I’ll have a final “homemade gift” post that shows what we did to package many of the gifts.

The post Homemade Gift Series, Extra Edition: Photo Cubes appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One component of many of our baskets this year is going to be cookies. Sarah is a spectacular cookie maker and she delightfully packages them up for people as well. This year, she decided to use a peanut butter-based cookie recipe for her cookie bundles.

In the picture above, Sarah is making cookies using tofu as an egg substitute – these actually turn out really well and were well liked by someone who thinks tofu is disgusting, so it works. Here’s what you need.

6 eggs (or 1 1/2 cups whipped tofu)
2 sticks margarine or butter
3 cups brown sugar
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups peanut butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
12 oz. chocolate chips (milk or semi-sweet, as per your preference)
3/4 cup chopped nuts (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
1 1/2 cups M&Ms (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
9 cups rolled oats

Making cookies is easy.

Mix together the butter/margarine and the sugar. Then, add the eggs/tofu, vanilla, and peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add all remaining ingredients, then mix well. Shape into small balls (about the size of a golf ball) and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 F (175 C) for 8 to 10 minutes. They’re done when they hold together but are still really chewy.

Naturally, we wanted to package these fairly nicely. Sarah’s simple solution was to take a large square of clear Saran Wrap, place three cookies in a stack in the middle, draw the Saran Wrap up around the cookies, twist the top, and tie it with a ribbon.

Quite nice! Of course, you might want to just make big batches of these cookies for any family events and dinners you have coming up, either at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.

We wanted to give some of these cookie bundles away as part of larger gift baskets that incorporate other homemade gifts. Over the last few months, we’ve been searching a wide variety of supply stores looking for small gift baskets, eventually finding a large box of them for about $0.40 a basket.

Here’s the basket we prepared.

This basket contains a cookie bundle, a jar of the wine jelly, and an ornament hand-painted by our daughter (who likes blue and purple). It’s nestled on a piece of blank newspaper from our end roll.

This is a small example of the gift baskets we’ll be giving out this year. Some will be larger and contain other items that we’ve made, and I’ll show you some of these later.

This may be the last entry in the series. We may be making one more item – if we do, we’ll show it to you in two weeks. There will also be a final post showing some of the packaging that we’re using for these gifts.

The post Homemade Gift Series #10: Homemade Cookies and Gift Bundle appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As we were making them, though, Sarah had the brilliant idea of making extras and giving them away as “add-ons” on some of the gifts we’d already made. “We could just put a ribbon through them and tie that ribbon around a jelly jar,” she suggested, referring to the jellies and jams we had already made for gifts.

Sounds like a good idea to me!

The ingredients for the dough are simple enough. One cup salt, two cups flour, five teaspoons of cinnamon, and 3/4 cup water (with maybe a bit more).

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the water slowly. Mix it together until it forms a ball, like so.

If you find the ball to be crumbly, add a bit more water, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. If you find it to be sticky, add a bit more flour, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. Eventually, you’ll find a happy medium – not too sticky, not too crumbly. That’s just what you want.

A note on the cinnamon: it’s added mostly to give the “cookie” ornaments a cinnamon smell. I felt that the five teaspoons didn’t give a very strong smell and if we were to make another batch of cookies, I would use at least ten teaspoons of cinnamon.

Once the dough is ready, wrap it up and put it in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to stiffen the dough. Then, roll the dough out to roughly 1/2″ thick (about 1.25 cm) – you can be approximate on this – on a lightly floured surface.

Use cookie cutters to cut the dough into shapes, then use a straw (or another device) to make a small hole on the top of the ornament shape. Then, bake until dry at 325 F – this usually takes about an hour. I recommend using parchment paper on top of a baking sheet to bake the ornaments.

We turned the leftover dough – the pieces between shapes that didn’t quite amount to enough to roll out again – into candy cane shapes for our own use.

Most of our ornaments were snowflakes, which we chose (for the time being) not to paint. We could have painted them white, of course.

The kids painted several of the ornaments, which turned this into a bit of a family art project. They went pretty over the top with the colors, though, which means these will make good additions to our tree and perhaps the trees of their grandparents, but maybe not the trees of others…

After the ornaments were painted, we sprayed them with a matte finish sprayable varnish so they would keep for a long time. We then slipped ribbons through some of the holes to look at our finished ornaments.

One important thing to note – these ornaments are actually surprisingly sturdy. One was dropped from a height of six feet onto a hardwood floor and as it fell, we fully expected it to break into bits. It seemed almost completely unharmed by the drop, perhaps losing a tiny crumb.

We look forward to tying these onto some of the handmade gifts we give out this year – and we also look forward to putting some of the ornaments on our own Christmas tree.

The post Homemade Gift Series #9: Handmade Ornaments appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As you can see, there’s some variety in the cards – the border colors changed, some of the photos are in color and some are grayscale, some depict nature and others depict family. The full set, numbering about 25 or so, included a wide variety of pictures and colors.

Simply put, this was one of Sarah’s favorite gifts she’s ever received. Some of the cards are nice enough that they could easily be framed for home decorations. Others are so aesthetically pleasing to Sarah that she simply can’t bear to part with them.

When we first started thinking about doing homemade gifts for people this year, these cards were the first thing that Sarah mentioned. We should make a batch of them for a great gift for someone.

Our first step was finding the elements that we needed to pull this off. The things we needed most were the material for the cards themselves, some additional craft paper for the borders, and the photos we wanted to use.

For the card material and the craft paper, we simply checked flyers and waited patiently for a sale. We watched craft stores like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby, as well as art supply stores and paper stores. Eventually, we found some huge discounts on just the items we wanted, picking up big piles of both craft paper and cards for a pittance. However, even if you do buy them at face value, the cost for 20-30 cards’ worth of material is $10-15 if you shop around.

What about the pictures? This is something I’ve been dealing with lately and deserves a full post on its own. However, my rules of thumb are this:

If you need just a picture or two, home printing is probably worth it.
If you’re printing ten or fifteen, the local department store is probably the best place.
If you’re ordering a lot of pictures (enough to get free shipping – say, 100+), there are online sources that take the cake.

Now, what about assembling a card?

Here, I just chose a black and white snapshot of my youngest son (actually taken by my niece). The simplest thing to do, of course, would be to simply paste it to the front of a card without any border at all. It’s quite simple and works, but I want to add a bit more panache to it.

My next attempt was to add a brown frame to the picture, using craft paper and scissors. Since the card is 5″ by 7″ and the picture is 4″ by 6″, I cut the paper at 4 2/3″ by 6 2/3″, making a thick brown border and a thin white border around it.

Do you like that one? I did, but I wanted to keep going.

I then cut out a tan craft paper rectangle measuring 4 1/3″ by 6 1/3″, then placed that between the dark brown rectangle and the photo, creating a “multi”-border effect that I quite liked.

As you can see, there are infinite options here and you can make whatever you like – different colored cards, different colored borders made out of craft paper, different photographs. They all result in different effects.

What pictures should you choose? I would suggest using prints that would have some personal meaning for the recipient: family members they care about, locations that have meaning to them, and things like that. You can also choose some of your best natural shots as well to give the card recipients some variety in the pictures.

Another note: I think the cards look better if the edges on your own work aren’t absolutely perfect, so don’t obsess on straight perfection. A little tiny bit of skewing adds a wonderful handmade flavor to the cards that can’t be duplicated.

One final thought: if you send out holiday cards to your family and friends, consider making some of these instead. They will really stand out from the pack.

The post Homemade Gift Series #8: Personalized Cards and Stationery appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This year, she elected to make a crocheted hat and scarf set for one particular relative (and is considering making a second set). Below, you can see our daughter modeling the output of this work, which took Sarah about eight hours to complete.

Obviously, you don’t need too much in terms of material to crochet – just a needle and a big pile of yarn. According to Sarah, it’s not too difficult to learn how to do it, either; you just need to know five or six simple techniques, then you just repeat them over and over again.

She recommends Lion Brand Yarn’s crocheting tutorial website for those who are interested in learning how to get started.

Another element that’s necessary when crocheting is to have a pattern to work from. As you can see in the picture above, Sarah made the hat based on a free pattern printed from a website (here’s the exact pattern she used).

One particularly great source for crochet patterns is Crochet Pattern Central, which offers a small mountain of patterns. Of particular note in relation to this post is the hat pattern list and the scarf pattern list.

Sarah did not use a scarf pattern and instead did it solely from memory, as she’s made scarves in the past for gifts (like the one I often wear in the winter).

The finished pair will make a nice gift for someone this Christmas.

Sarah is considering making at least one more hat-and-scarf set for the Christmas season. She estimates that each item took about four hours of nonstop work, but it’s work that can easily be done while watching a movie and can be set aside at almost any point so you can engage in other activities.

This is a gift that turns something very inexpensive and ordinary (yarn) into something beautiful (crocheted garments), with just a little time and care added by the gift giver.

The post Homemade Gift Series #7: Crocheted Hat and Scarf appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The jar on the left, obviously, is a “Rainbow Brownie” mix, to which you add just a couple liquid ingredients, pour into a pan, and bake at 350 F for 30 minutes. The one on the right is a soup mix, to which you add 6 cups of water (and, optionally, 1/2 lb. ground beef) and boil in a pot for 45 minutes (or in a crock pot for an afternoon).

The nice thing about jars like these is that you can easily mix the ingredients for yourself and keep them in a jar or a baggie for future use. They won’t look quite as pretty as these jars, but they’ll certainly be functional (see below).

Let’s take a peek at the contents of the two jars.

Soup Jar

In the picture above, we made a pint jar, which is a half-batch of what’s described below. That’s because we’re giving that jar to a couple with one very young child. If you want to give this to a larger family or want to ensure that the recipient has leftovers, make the full batch, as described below.

1/3 cup beef bullion granules
1/4 cup dried minced onion
1/2 cup dried split peas
1/2 cup twist macaroni
1/4 cup barley
2 cups dried lentils
1/3 cup long grain white rice
1 cup uncooked tri-color spiral pasta

We added these ingredients to a quart jar, going right down the list. As you can see above, Joe helped with this.

The finished soup jar has a nice pretty layered look to it, something very cute to put into the cupboard that’s also functional, too.

Of course, if you’d like, you can make the same mix for yourself and keep it in a baggie or a jar. We added all of these ingredients to a few baggies for our own use. A quick labeling with some identification of the contents and some instructions and we have some good meals ready to go for later this winter.

Brownie Jar

We followed a similar procedure with the brownie jar. You’ll need the following ingredients (and a quart jar, of course).

1 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2/3 cup cocoa powder
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup pecans or chocolate chips or M&Ms

First, mix the flour, baking powder, and salt together before putting them in the jar.

After that, you’re just going to be adding powdered ingredients to a quart jar. We started with the flour layer, then put the cocoa on top of that. At this point, spend some time to pack down the flour and cocoa mix with whatever you have on hand to push down on the powder; otherwise, you’ll run out of room before you can put in all of the mix-ins.

Put in the sugar next, then top it with the mix-ins (pecans or chocolate chips or M&Ms).

Finishing Steps

On the top of each jar, put an ordinary lid and a ring so that it can easily be opened later. We also put a sticker on the bottom of each jar listing the ingredients (in case recipients have allergies).

We also bought some bulk cloth at a fabric shop and cut it into large squares (5″ by 5″ or so), then tied this piece of cloth to the top of the jar with a ribbon.

To that ribbon, we also tied instruction tags. One side describes the item, the other side explains what needs to be done.

Here’s the text for the soup jar tag:

In large kettle, brown 1 lb. ground beef (optional). Remove tri-color pasta and reserve. Add rest to kettle with 12 cups water. Let come to a boil and simmer for 45 minutes. Add tri color pasta and simmer 15 minutes more.

Here’s the text for the brownie jar tag:

Preheat to 350 F. Grease 9″x13″ baking pan. Empty jar into large bowl and stir to blend. Mix in 1 cup melted butter, 3 eggs, and 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Mix thoroughly. Spread in pan. Bake 25-30 minutes. Cool completely before cutting. Optional but recommended: replace 1 cup butter with 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup applesauce.

In the end, you’ve got some cute – and highly functional – gifts to share whenever you need them.

The post Homemade Gift Series #6: Meals in a Jar appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

So we decided to make another jelly/jam, this time doing something decidedly different: wine jelly.

What’s “wine jelly”? It’s much like grape jelly, but instead of using grape juice, you use a bottle of wine of your choosing for the primary liquid in the jelly.

In this case, we chose to use a bottle of Celebrate, a 2007 wine from a local winery, White Oak Vineyards. It’s a ruby red semi-sweet wine made from a blend of grapes that has a tartness to it that’s almost like cranberries. We quite like it.

Thus, one fun way to make this jelly is to choose a bottle of wine from a local winery that you particularly like and use it as the backbone for your jelly. This enables the wine to have a bit of additional local flavor to it. You can, of course, use any wine of your choosing – for example, a bottle of Charles Shaw from Trader Joe’s will work quite well and only set you back $3 for the wine.

What ingredients will you need? Our recipe simply follows a very standard grape jelly recipe:

3 1/2 cups wine
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 package dry pectin (1.75 oz. or 2 oz. depending on the brand)
4 1/2 cups sugar

You’ll also, of course, need the usual stuff for canning: six jars with lids and rings, a pot to boil the stuff in, and some sort of mechanism for pulling the jars in and out of boiling water. In the pictures below, we’re using a plastic “bucket” we found for fifty cents at a sale recently.

A note on the wine: you’ll often need a bit more liquid than what a bottle of wine contains, as a bottle will often only give you three cups or a bit more. Feel free to add the remnants of a second wine or even a bit of grape juice to get yourself up to the total amount.

The first step, of course, is to boil the jars, lids, and rings and make sure they’re as clean as possible. This way, you minimize the chance of unwanted bacteria inside of the jars, which would render the jelly unusable.

After that, just mix the wine, lemon juice, and pectin in a large sauce pot (one that can easily hold 12 cups of liquid. Bring it to a boil while stirring it rapidly.

Once it’s boiling, add the sugar, then keep stirring rapidly to dissolve all of the sugar in the liquid. Bring it back to a rolling boil while stirring, then boil it for at least one minute while stirring (you can boil it a bit longer – if you do, the jelly will be just a bit thicker).

Once the hot jelly is finished, ladle the jelly into the jars, leaving 1/2″ inch (1.3 cm) at the tops of the jars for breathing room. Put the lids on them, then put the jars into a boiling water bath for five minutes (you can do this in shifts, of course).

You’ll find that you have enough jelly for six jars, with a bit left over. We used that “bit left over” on our morning toast for a few days – delicious!

When you’re done, put the jars out on a towel and leave them untouched for 24 hours. Leave at least an inch of space between each of the jars.

After the 24 hours are up, check the lids and make sure none of them have popped up. If you’re unsure, press down a bit on the middle of a lid – if it “clicks” or “pops,” that’s a bad jar. Most likely, they’ll all be fine, but don’t keep a bad jar of anything that you can.

As you can see, our jelly turned out with a reddish-purple color. It’s a bit tart and, in my opinion, is almost perfect on toast in the morning.

Later, we’re going to make a second batch of this jelly, using one of our favorite white wines. This will result in a yellowish or nearly clear jelly.

The post Homemade Gift Series #5: Wine Jelly appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Plus, it makes a really cool gift for someone who appreciates a good homecrafted beer.

What follows is my procedure for making a simple homemade beer. I chose to base this batch on a kit, because kit brewing is without a doubt the easiest way for a newcomer to try out homebrewing.

A homebrew beer kit, like the one pictured above, can be purchased at your local homebrewer’s shop. Most cities with a population of 50,000 or more have one – the larger the city, the more likely it is that there will be multiple shops. Search around for them, visit a few shops, identify a beer kit you’d like to try, and don’t be afraid to shop around.

For this year’s Christmas beer, I chose to make a lighter beer with hints of coriander and orange. The kit came with a small amount of each – I chose to add a few coriander seeds on my own.

A homebrew beer kit contains all of the liquid and solid ingredients you need for beermaking besides the water, the glass bottles, a pot to boil the beer in as you’re making it, and another container for the beer to ferment in. You’ll also need a small handheld device for putting the caps on the bottles.

How do you get those things? You can purchase the bottles or accumulate them on your own. You can use any large pot in your kitchen for the boiling. As for the rest…

… I recommend picking up a simple homebrewing equipment kit at that shop as well, especially if you’re thinking about brewing your own beer regularly. A kit usually includes a large bucket with a spigot near the bottom (with a tight-sealing lid that has a breathe hole), a small bubbler that allows gas to escape the bucket without exposing the beer to air as it is fermenting, a capping tool, and usually a piece of rubber hose to make the bottling easier.

We brew beer fairly often (a few batches a year), so we usually use a five gallon glass bottle for most of our fermenting needs. For beginners, it doesn’t make a big difference, but a glass bottle allows less gas to escape through the sides of the container.

The first thing to do is to sterilize everything you’re going to use to the best of your ability. We use an iodine-based solution for this cleaning – you can use bleach or whatever you choose.

The next thing you’ll do with your kit is fill a large pot with about two gallons of water and heat it to boiling. You’ll then make what I sarcastically call a “tea bag.”

The “tea bag” is simply a cheesecloth bag (usually included in the kit) that is wrapped around the dry grains used in beer making – wheat, oats, and various other things depending on the type of beer you’re making.

All you do is put those grains in the cheesecloth bag, tie the top, and put it in the boiling water for an hour or so (depending, again, on the specific grains – don’t worry, kits include an instruction sheet). You’ll usually end up with cloudy water.

Once the “tea bag” is finished, you start adding other ingredients – liquid malt (shown above), dried malt powder, hops, coriander, and orange peel all go into the pot. This is stirred regularly and boiled for about fifty minutes.

Looks yummy, doesn’t it?

Once the boiling is finished, you need to cool the hot beer rapidly. I do this by preparing an ice bath in my kitchen sink. I simply fill one of the basins with cold water, add a bunch of ice to it, and stick the whole boiling pot straight in there. The ice water on the outside of the container helps to cool down the beer rapidly (and rapid stirring helps, too).

Once the beer is down to about 80 F or so (35 C), just pour the contents of the pot straight into your fermenting bucket (make sure the spigot at the bottom is closed!). Add room temperature water until the bucket is full to the five gallon mark, then sprinkle some yeast on the surface and stir the yeast into the beer.

Once that’s done, put the lid on the bucket, put the bubbler on the lid, make sure there’s a bit of water in the bubbler, and wait.

After about 12 hours, you’ll start to see rapid bubbling in the bubbler. This will go on for a couple days, then slow down gradually until it appears not to be bubbling. You want the fermentation to stop before you add it to the bottles.

The way I do it is that I wait until it appears not to be bubbling any more. I then watch the bubbler for three minutes. If I see a bubble, I wait one more day and watch again. If I don’t see a bubble, I mark the calendar and bottle the beer three days later.

Bottling is also easy. Make sure the bottles are as clean as you possibly can (you’ll need roughly 50 bottles). As mentioned above, use bleach or an iodine solution and rinse the bottles thoroughly.

Next, mix the priming sugar with two cups of boiling water and boil the mix for a few minutes. This provides food for the remaining yeast to add carbonation to the beer – that wonderful bubbliness. Cool the priming sugar mix, then add it to the bucket and stir for a couple of minutes.

Then, simply fill up each bottle with the spigot. Go slowly and carefully – use the plastic tubing and pinch the tube to control the flow. You’ll want to leave an inch or so of air in the neck of the bottle. Put a cap on the top with the capper (in your kit) and you’ve got yourself a bottle of beer!

Our coriander-orange beer is currently still fermenting, so the completed bottle pictures are of our previous batch, a hefeweizen.

For our own homebrew, we just reuse six pack boxes of other kinds of beer (in this case, Shiner Bock). We label the caps with a number to identify which beer is which.

For our finished gift bottles, we’re planning on making custom labels of our own design.

What’s the cost of this? The initial equipment can cost $20 to $30, depending on availability in your area. Each kit costs about $25 and makes roughly eight six packs of bottled beer. Thus, if you’re just making one batch, it can be pricy, but if you’re going to make several, the initial equipment is prorated across all of your batches and the price becomes very reasonable, especially given the high quality of the beer you’re making.

I’m very serious about the quality of homebrewed beer. The three best beers I’ve ever had in my life were brewed in my own home. The freshness of the ingredients and the control you have over those ingredients allows you to make some incredibly good beer at a great price.

Even better, it makes a great gift.

The post Homemade Gift Series #4: Homemade Beer appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

So what exactly do you do with eight and a half pounds of apples? You make something with them, of course.

We pulled out a recipe for “Caramel Apple Jam” from The Taste of Home Cookbook and modified it a bit, adding a bit of additional cinnamon kick to it (because we love cinnamon). Of course, delicious homemade canned treats are wonderful to give away to your friends and family, so we decided to can most of the apples in the form of caramel apple jam.

What do you need if you want to cook up a batch of this jam?

The first thing you need is jars. We picked up two dozen jars for canning the apple jam (and perhaps a later project). I really strongly recommend using new jars if you’re going to be giving them away as gifts (which was our plan).

Sarah shopped around and was able to find a dozen jars with lids and rings for $5.99 – about $0.50 per jar, lid, and ring set.

You also need a few pieces of equipment – things that can be reused if you begin to can things regularly.

You need a stirring spoon, which you probably already have. You also need tongs (with which to move the jars around) – I recommend picking up tongs made for canning. We’re also using a funnel (which makes pouring liquids into the jars much easier) and a little tool that helps us to quickly see how much breathing room we have at the top of a jar so that we don’t overfill (it’s the blue notched thing).

You can pick up this equipment at many department stores – often, the equipment you need here comes in a kit.

You’ll also need a large pot. We use a four gallon stock pot. You can also get a canning rack to sit the jars in while dipping them into boiling water, but we don’t use one. Instead, we just put a towel in the bottom of the large pot before we add the water. This towel provides a soft bottom upon which we merely sit the jars, keeping them from cracking (which is the purpose of the rack).

Here are the ingredients for the jam we made. You can basically substitute whatever jam or jelly recipe you like (in fact, we’ll probably present a second recipe later in this homemade gift series).

6 cups apples, diced and peeled (1/8 inch cubes, roughly – this takes about three pounds of whole apples)
1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon butter
1 package (1.75 ounces) powdered fruit pectin
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Peeling and dicing the apples is really easy if you have an apple peeler/corer/slicer, something we found at a yard sale a few years ago for $1. You just stick the apple on it, turn the handle (easy enough my three year old daughter can do it), and the device peels the apple, removes the core, and puts a big spiral slice in that apple.

After that, you just have to chop the apple in the opposite direction to get the nice small pieces you need for the jam.

One thing you’ll need to do is boil the jars and lids to clean them. You can do this at any time in the process that’s convenient, as long as they’ve been boiled by the time you’re ready to put the jam in the jars.

In a pan, combine the apples with the 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 teaspoon butter. Cook this over low heat for an hour or so, stirring regularly, until the apples are soft.

At first, it will seem impossible that these dry-seeming apples and this little bit of water will ever combine with all of that sugar to make any kind of liquid jam. What will happen is that slowly, the apples will begin to give off liquid and, as the apples get soft, you’ll have about as much liquid as apple in the pan.

When the apples are getting soft, you should get the boiling pot going. Put a towel on the bottom, then add water until your jars would be covered by two inches. Turn on the heat and get the water boiling!

Once the apples are nice and soft (use your own judgment – you don’t want them to be really crisp in the jam, after all, but some soft chunks are delicious), add the pectin, stir it in, then bring the whole mix up to a rolling boil.

Then, add the sugar. This is a fun part, because it all becomes a very thick liquid as you stir it. Bring it back to a rolling boil (and be careful here, it can splatter). Stir it constantly and let it boil for one minute.

Remove the jam from the heat, then add the jam to the jars with a spoon until there’s a quarter of an inch between the top of the jam and the top of the jar. Clean off the rim of the jar, put a lid on it, then put a ring on top of that, turning the ring until you just begin to feel resistance. Repeat until you’re out of jam (we made six jars, with a bit left over to have immediately on toast).

Take these closed jars and put them in the big pot of boiling water. Keep the water boiling and leave the jars in there for ten minutes, then pull them out. Put the jars on a towel with a couple inches free space around each jar. Let the jars sit for 24 hours to cool and make sure after the cooling that the lids are depressed (meaning if you push down in the middle, it doesn’t “click” – if it does, the jar needs to go).

And there you have it – wonderful jars of delicious apple jam!

I recommend writing the contents and the date on the top of the jar after they’re sealed, for future reference.

The post Homemade Gift Series #3: Caramel Apple Jam appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Warning #1 Making soap at home can be very fun and rewarding, and if done right, it can be an inexpensive way to make gifts. But it can also be very dangerous if proper precautions aren’t taken. Before starting any soap-making project, please familiarize yourself with the dangers, and I would strongly encourage any soap-makers who have children (and even those who don’t) to read this account of a child who was burned by lye in a home soap-making accident. Then, be sure you have someplace you can send your kids while you make soap—preschool, a grandparent’s house, a friend’s house, etc. If you can’t get the young children out of the house, don’t make soap!

And if that wasn’t clear enough…

Warning #2 The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that you can, in fact, make very high quality hand-crafted homemade soap at home and to describe how we make homemade soap. However, before you even consider making your own, you should thoroughly read the additional soap-making resources included in this post, understand thoroughly what you are doing, and take every possible safety precaution. If you choose to make your own soap, you do so at your own risk, and neither The Simple Dollar or Trent Hamm takes any responsibility for any accidents or damage that may occur during that process.

Here’s the scoop, folks: making homemade soap at home is a lot of fun and results in some great soap that not only works well for your own use, but makes for a great gift, too. However, you do use some harsh chemicals in the making of this soap and you absolutely need to take precautions when making it to keep yourself safe and others safe. I hate having to warn people so directly about it, but lye can be dangerous and I don’t want anyone getting hurt by it. Be safe, people.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we made a lot of soap this year…

My wife, Sarah, has made many batches of homemade soap over the years and has even conducted classes where she has taught others how to make their own batches of soap. To put it simply, she’s an old hand at this, and she’s turned out some very impressive homemade soaps over the years.

This year, for our homemade gifts project, we decided to make a large batch of homemade soap. Sarah took charge of this project – I mostly served as an assistant to her, doing things like taking our older children to preschool and caring for our baby on the other side of the house and offering hands-on help during the period when the baby slept or when she needed to be around for feedings. She also documented our procedure quite well, so much of this post is made off of her notes.

Before you consider doing this yourself, we both strongly encourage you to read other soap-making resources carefully. Sarah highly recommends the following websites:
http://www.millersoap.com/soapdesign.html offers details on designing your own soap
http://www.soap-making-resource.com/saponification-table.html (and the whole Soap Making Resource website) provides specific details about soap ingredients
http://www.countryfarm-lifestyles.com/saponification-chart.html provides more details about various possible soap ingredients

Soap Ingredients
Here are the basic ingredients we used in our soap recipe.

Sodium hydroxide (a.k.a. lye) – this can be fairly hard to find. We have had success finding it at Lowe’s Hardware, where we purchased a 2 pound container (with substantial leftovers). Look for it in the drain cleaner section.
Olive oil – we purchased a three liter bottle and used all of it
Coconut oil – we used the entirety of a 14 ounce jar
Lard – we used a one pound block of lard

The three oils (olive oil, coconut oil, and lard) each serve a different purpose in the soap: the olive oil is the base, and is a good soap for your skin but doesn’t lather well and it makes a relatively soft soap. Both the coconut oil and the lard will make the soap harder and improve its lathering. The coconut oil makes a fluffy lather, and the lard makes a stable lather. Overall, this soap would be considered a “castile soap” because it is mostly olive oil. Other recipes that you can find online will use different oils and in different amounts. We chose these oils because they should make a good soap, and they are easy for us to find locally.

These are the two basic ingredients you need for soap – an oil and sodium hydroxide. Everything else that follows is either equipment or is intended to “spruce up” the soap.

Equipment
Pictured above is the safety equipment we used to keep ourselves safe during the soap making. Keep in mind that almost all of this stuff is reusable for other purposes.

Safety goggles (for safety, use goggles, not safety glasses) – we found these at Lowe’s
Latex gloves – again, found at Lowe’s
Vinegar – keep a jug of this on hand to neutralize any spilled lye; if you’re careful, you won’t need it
Old clothes – shirt (long sleeves), pants (preferably a thick fabric like denim), socks and shoes (Don’t wear shorts, sandals, etc!)

We also needed quite a bit of equipment for the actual mixing.

Kitchen scale (it’s just generally useful to have one in the kitchen)
Large pot for melting oils and fats in (can be reused for food)
Measuring cup for measuring water or goat’s milk (can be reused for food)
Container for making lye solution in (can’t be reused for food – we used an old bowl picked up at Goodwill for pennies)
Smaller container for measuring solid lye in (can’t be reused for food – we used another old bowl picked up at Goodwill for pennies)
Spoon for stirring soap (can’t be reused for food)
Bucket for mixing soap in (can’t be reused for food – we used our homemade laundry detergent bucket)
Thermometer (should read temperatures of around 100°F) (can’t be reused for food – we have a general use garage thermometer)

Almost all of this stuff was simply around our house already, so we didn’t have to buy any of these items specifically for the soapmaking.

Soap Molds
Be creative in what you use for molds, and this doesn’t have to be expensive. As you can see, we used yogurt containers, boxes lined with saran wrap, a couple drawer organizers found at a yard sale, and a bread-shaped plastic container that Sarah picked up at a dollar store for $0.50. Other items to consider using include the bottoms of pop bottles, which make nice flower-shaped soaps. If you don’t mind spending a little money, and if you plan on making soap again in the future, you might want to purchase actual soap molds that you can find online or in hobby shops.

Add-Ins
In order to make our homemade soap unique, add some color and texture to it, and make it gentler on the skin, we used a few additional ingredients that aren’t required:

Dried lavender (or possibly sage, peppermint, or other herbs)
Goat milk (we used fresh goat milk from a local farmer)
Oatmeal
Scented lotion

What We Did
Here are the exact amounts of the key ingredients we used in our soap. You absolutely need the oils, the sodium hydroxide, and some water or other liquid.

4.5 cups goat’s milk (or 4.5 cups cow milk, or 4.5 cups water) – partially frozen
2000 g olive oil (this is less than 3 liters)
460 g lard (a 1 lb. package)
382 g coconut oil (a 14 oz. jar)
398 g of sodium hydroxide (this is your lye or drain cleaner)

If you’d like to make this recipe less expensive, leave out the coconut oil and/or the lard. If you do, that will need to change the amount of sodium hydroxide you use. 2,000 g of olive oil needs 255 g of sodium hydroxide, 460 g of lard needs 60 g of sodium hydroxide, and 382 g of coconut oil needs 83 g of sodium hydroxide. (Add all three numbers up to get my total of 398 g.) You should also use only 4 cups of goat’s milk or water instead of 4.5 cups.

Sarah largely wrote the following procedural pieces, with just a bit of detail editing from me.

The night before making the soap, we put the goat’s milk in an old Tupperware container with a lid and froze it in the deep freeze. The next morning, I took it out and let it thaw until I was ready to use it. You would want to do the same with cow’s milk or water. The goal with the frozen liquid is to get it to a slushy consistency.

Once the milk was slushy, I measured out my three oils (olive oil, coconut oil, and lard) and put them in a pot on the stove. I heated them on low heat until the solids were melted and the temperature was around 100°F. Be very careful not to overheat the fats! It won’t ruin anything, but it will take the temperature a long time to drop back down to 100°F.

While the oils were heating, I prepared the lavender and the oatmeal. I put a handful of the oatmeal into my coffee grinder and set it for the finest grind I could. This made a very fine oatmeal powder, which I then dumped into the oils. You do not have to grind the oatmeal – we chose to do it for a smoother texture, but the texture of oats in the soap may also be appealing.

Next, I put about half of my lavender (also about a handful) in the coffee grinder on the coarsest grind setting. I put that into the oils, along with a handful of unground lavender buds (for texture).

I would recommend adding any herbs or oatmeal to the oil before adding the sodium hydroxide. If you have any essential oils, lotions, or colors to add, I would wait until the soap “traces”, which happens after the sodium hydroxide is added, which is the next step.

Put on goggles and gloves now!! Sodium hydroxide (lye) is incredibly caustic and dangerous!! Do not do this while children are anywhere nearby!!

After adding the lavender and oatmeal, I measured out the sodium hydroxide. I would recommend doing anything involving the sodium hydroxide outside, on a surface lined with garbage bags. I took the kitchen scale outside and put the sodium hydroxide into a container with a lid, so that I could seal it up if I got interrupted while measuring.

Once the sodium hydroxide is measured, I slowly and carefully added it to the goat’s milk slurry. As I mixed, the solution got very hot, which is why I got the liquid so cold to begin with. If you use goat’s milk, you’ll notice that it turns yellow, which I’ve read is a result of the sugars in the milk being caramelized by the heat. (Starting with cold milk lessens this effect.)

At the start of the sodium hydroxide addition, the goat’s milk is white and slushy…

… and after adding the sodium hydroxide, the goat’s milk mixture is yellow and creamy:

After mixing, I took the temperature of the sodium hydroxide/milk mixture, and found that it was about 140°F. I had to let it cool down to about 100°F, while keeping the oils at 100°F as well. Once the two liquids reached close to 100°F, it was time to mix.

I poured the oils into the bucket first, and then slowly poured the sodium hydroxide/milk mixture into them. For safety reasons, don’t pour the oils in last. Once everything is mixed, we started stirring. We took turns stirring and kept it up for about an hour and a half before it was ready to pour into the molds. That happens when the soap “traces”, which means that if you run the spoon through it you’ll be able to see an indentation for a few seconds before it disappears. When I teach others how to make soap, I tell my students to wait for the soap to reach a consistency of mayonnaise.

Once the soap traced and before pouring it into the soap molds, I added a few squirts of some scented lotion that I have leftover from a couple of Christmases ago. I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make in the final product, but it might add a little more moisturizing.

We then poured the soap into the molds, put them in the garage, cleaned up, and went to pick up the kids from preschool.

One thing to note is that the color of the soap when you pour it into the molds will be different than the final soap color after it ages. Our soap this time was almost orange in color when we poured it (as you can see), but after aging, it has mellowed to a very light tan.

The next day I put on gloves again and unmolded the soaps that needed to be cut (mostly a matter of tapping on the bottom and sometimes cutting around the edge of the soap with a knife), since they were still pretty soft.

We sliced the large bars (the ones from the old drawer organizers) into smaller individual bars.

As you can see, the bars have a “rough hewn” look. For some, that’s a big plus as it gives a clear “homemade” effect to the bars. If it’s a negative for you, wait until the bars have aged for a month or so, then sand them down until they’re smooth.

I waited an extra day to unmold the soaps in the yogurt containers, which gave them a chance to get a little bit harder.

We particularly liked the “Union Jack” effect on the bars from some of the yogurt containers, as you can see above.

Finally, I covered the table in the garage with cardboard and set out the new soap to age for a few weeks. This allows time for the soap to finish reacting and for the excess water to evaporate, hardening the soap. I would recommend not using the soap until it has had time to age, a minimum of three weeks.

Giving As Gifts
There are a lot of ways to package soaps as gifts. Once the soap is dry, we are going to try out two different packaging ideas – wrapping them in tissue paper, or wrapping them with a strip of brown paper while leaving the edges of the soap exposed. In either case, we’re also going to put a cute homemade sticker on each bar.

Again, if you’re considering doing this, read up on soapmaking, understand what you’re doing, and use proper safety equipment without children around.

If you’re surprised by the “harshness,” remember that this is how soap is made. Whenever you buy soap in a store, some process similar to this is used, often with oils that you’d rather not think about instead of olive oil and coconut oil.

For next week’s homemade gift, we’re going to kick out the jams.

The post Homemade Gift Series #2: Homemade Soap appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Many great Christmas memories from childhood came up, as did some other great memories from various holidays since our marriage.

Yet, when we both began to list some of our favorite gifts received over the last several years, we found that many of the memorable gifts we received weren’t ones that were picked up at the local department store. They weren’t expensive ones, either.

In fact, a lot of the gifts that really stood out as thoughtful and memorable were homemade gifts.

Rachel is particularly good at these types of gifts, and so it’s unsurprising that several of the gifts we both mentioned were ones that came from her. As I’ve mentioned before, Rachel is a close friend who chose a career in social work and took on the incredible challenge of working with mentally handicapped individuals, doing what she can to enable them to enjoy the simple pleasures of everyday life and camaraderie with their peers. It’s incredibly challenging work, yet somehow she does it every day.

When it comes time for holidays, Rachel often makes handmade gifts for people, and it’s those handmade gifts that are memorable. She’s done all sorts of things over the years – I particularly remember some handmade journals made from homemade paper. Beautiful and one-of-a-kind.

Reflecting on that, Sarah and I asked ourselves, “Why don’t we make mostly handmade gifts for people this year?”

The reasons are many.

They’re often less expensive in terms of dollars and cents. Homemade gifts aren’t free – they always have a cost. However, when you compare the cost of a homemade item to the most similar item to it that can be purchased in a store or online, you can make many such items at home at a lower cost.

Instead, they pass along value in the form of time and care. More importantly, though, you get to choose everything about how you assemble the gift. Every ingredient, every visual element, every choice – it’s all up to you. A homemade gift allows you to pour some of your care for others directly into the item that you’re giving instead of just pulling it off the shelf at Target.

They’ll make for memorable gifts. Since homemade gifts are most assuredly not just something shipped to you from Amazon, they’re also going to be memorable. It’s easy to forget an item yanked off the shelf at Wal-Mart. It’s harder to forget a carefully-made homemade item with a custom, thoughtful label.

We might make some useful things for ourselves along the way. Many homemade gift ideas can also serve a purpose around your own home – after all, you’re making items that you consider worthy of giving to people you love, so shouldn’t you find them at least somewhat useful yourself?

We might learn some useful ideas and skills along the way. As we make homemade gifts, we’ll be picking up knowledge and skills along the way. Not only will this serve us in terms of knowing how to make the item, many individual pieces of knowledge and specific skills can find applications elsewhere.

So, this year, we’re going to try our hand at making a lot of homemade gifts… and we’re going to share these experiences and gift ideas with you.

Over the next several weeks (somewhere between eight and twelve, depending on what gift list we finally decide on), Friday afternoons will feature a post outlining a homemade gift we’ve made for the people we care about.

Some will be simple. Others will be complicated. At least one will seem a bit dangerous. Some will be very cheap. Others will have some additional cost to them. A few will seem awesome to you, and others will seem boring (I’m betting, though, that the boring/awesome divide will be different for different people). You might even decide to try some of them, both for yourself and for gifts.

I’m going to try to order the series so that the posts focusing on gifts that require the most lead time come first. If you decide to make a particular gift right after reading the post (even if it’s for yourself), you should always have enough time to get the materials and get the gift ready before Christmas.

At the end of the series, we’ll give you a peek at all of the items we’ve made for gifts for others. We have a lot of people to give small gifts to, from neighbors and teachers to friends and business associates. Plus, we’re going to bundle some of the items as gift baskets for people close to us (with a few little surprises for them that won’t be spoiled on the site).

Tune in this afternoon for the first in the series, a very simple homemade item that we’re practically as anxious to use ourselves as we are to give it to friends.

The post On Homemade Christmas Gifts appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

No more. This is the year we declare our financial independence from unwanted gift exchanges.

Step #1: Decide if you really want out
When faced with a big pile of bills and debt, it can be easy to tell ourselves that we’re going to cut down on gift-giving next year. We think about all of the gifts we bought, think of the ones that seemed like the biggest stretches to our budget and our personal lives, and begin to feel something negative about that gift. Discomfort. Resentment. Annoyance. Disgust.

Yet, quite often, we also like the gift exchange process with people we care about, even if it’s with people we don’t see all that often.

It can be a real emotional conundrum, and it’s one that deserves some careful thought. Do you really want out of the whole picture? It’s quite possible – and quite justifiable – that you do, but any gift you gave in previous years deserves some reflection this year.

I’m in two different gift exchanges that have given me pause in the last year. In each case, it’s a gift exchange with extended family members that I don’t see too much during the year. We’ve made the decision to get out of one of them, but after some deep reflection, we decided to remain in the other one, though we are going to suggest some changes to them.

Step #2: Come up with the alternative you would prefer
Most likely, you’re going to come up with some mixed feelings about some of these gift exchanges. I’d encourage you to consider alternative options that do not devalue the real value of the holiday season – spending time with people you care about. Here are several such options.

A “secret Santa” exchange Instead of everyone giving a gift to everyone, simply draw names in some fashion and have each person give a single gift to another person.

A “handmade” or “thoughtful” gift exchange Instead of buying stuff, have a gift exchange where items of more personal value are given. There are lots of options here – and the more creative your family is, the better. You can agree to give each other handmade items. You can agree to give each other “coupons” for personal favors later on (like a night of babysitting for a harried parent or two hours of cleaning for an elderly person). You can give each other “thank you” cards, handwritten, that express thanks for what that person has meant to you in life and in the last year.

A potluck dinner Instead of having a gift exchange, just have a big potluck dinner during the holiday season. Don’t make it about stuff – make it about family. I think this is perhaps the best default option for a lot of families and other groups.

A volunteer afternoon Instead of getting together to give each other stuff, perhaps you could all spend a few hours doing something like working in a soup kitchen or building a Habitat for Humanity house. It gets you together and creates something worthwhile for the community. This is a great suggestion to replace an office Christmas party.

Step #3: Communicate, communicate, communicate
Once you know which exchanges you want to get out of or alter, it’s time to communicate.

Some people will arrange this by email. Others will use Facebook. Still others will do it over the phone. It has a lot to do with the people you’re dealing with.

Here are two different email templates that you can use and alter to your heart’s content.

Hey Sally,

I’m looking forward to seeing you all at Christmas dinner this year!

With the economy, though, I was thinking of suggesting that we don’t do a gift exchange this year like we’ve done in the past. Instead, what do you think about just doing a “secret Santa” exchange with the adults and a second one with all of the kids? That way, we all have a gift to open, but it won’t leave any of us in financial trouble.

Let me know what you think!

Love,
Tim

That one would work well with siblings and close cousins. For an office exchange, you might want to try something like this:

Hello all,

Instead of the usual office gift exchange this year, let’s put aside a Saturday afternoon in December and have all of us spend a few hours doing some volunteer work? It’d help us get in touch with the people that truly need help in life, plus it would give some excellent public relations to our firm.

What do you all think of this idea?

Janine

Who should I send such an email to? If there’s a person or two who are obviously organizing the Christmas exchanges based on past experience, contact them first and see what they think. Make sure you include an easy-to-choose alternative in your email.

If there is no central person (particularly if the exchange just involves a small group), contact everyone in the group. Do it individually – some people may feel very nervous about saying that they want out to the whole group. Give them an avenue to tell you how they feel about it one-on-one.

Shouldn’t I call people instead? It entirely depends on your relationship with the people involved. For some relationships, email would work best. For others, Facebook. For still others, a phone call would be the best route.

What if no one agrees with me? You’ll have to make your own decision when it comes to that point. You can simply ask to drop out of the exchange, or you can just shrug your shoulders and go along with the flow of it. If you’re really uncomfortable, though, just ask to leave the exchange.

Step #4: Stick to your guns
Once the decision has been made to alter the gift exchange, you might feel some regret, particularly when the Christmas season comes around. Don’t. This one’s worth sticking to your guns on, especially if you’re still actually spending time with your family during the holiday season.

Instead, focus on why you did this in the first place. Recall the emotions and thoughts that led you to the decision to leave the exchange. Keep them in mind.

Most importantly, enjoy the camaraderie. In the end, the value of seeing family during the holidays isn’t found in the gifts. It’s found in the people and the time spent together.

Good luck!

The post Now’s the Time to Stop (or Alter) a Christmas Gift Exchange appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

We usually make a list of things to look for (as we do virtually every time we go shopping). I thought it might be worthwhile to share that list with you, to help you if you’re out and about the next few days and looking to shave some dollars off of next year’s Christmas budget (and maybe even net a few dollars right now).

Christmas lights If you need to replace some lights – or even just intend to hang more lights outdoors, as we do next year – now is the time to pick up Christmas lights, as many department stores deeply discount such lights. Even better, many energy companies will offer you a rebate for buying LED Christmas lights, so save your receipts and check with your energy company.

Wrapping paper and supplies Wrapping paper is an obvious thing that many people look for at after Christmas sales, but you can often find many other supplies on deep discount as well, such as gift wrapping tape and ribbon.

Cards We usually make our own Christmas cards (so if we see blank cards, we might pick them up), but for many people, Christmas cards can be a spectacular bargain right now as many stores are offloading them.

Non-perishable gift baskets Unsold gift baskets often go at a tremendous discount and if you can find ones that are non-perishable (like bath supplies and such), they can easily be stored for a year and given the following December. Many people often exchange such gift baskets with professional acquaintances and such, so this can be a tremendous savings. If you know you’ll be giving gift baskets of this kind for Christmas 2010, get them now and save yourself some cash.

Electronics – but only if you’re patient The Consumer Electronics Show takes place early each January. During that show, electronics companies unveil their product lines for the coming year and usually eliminate some product lines to replace them. Quite often, retailers know what lines are going to be cut and start trimming the prices on those lines to clear space for the new lines to be unveiled at CES. Thus, late December through January are great times to pick up home electronics.

Of course, you have to be careful with this type of sale. For starters, do not be afraid of the word “clearance” or other such words. Almost always, there’s nothing at all wrong with the model – it’s just being replaced by a different model in the coming year – one HDTV being replaced with a very similar HDTV with a higher price, for example. Also, different stores tend to handle such clearances differently, so you may want to simply shop around for a while to look for what you need. Don’t lock yourself into a particular brand or model – keep your eyes open. Write down clearance models, then research them at home.

Exercise equipment These items are usually on sale due to the upcoming New Year (and related New Year’s resolutions), but there are often spectacular bargains on basic exercise equipment in the week between Christmas and New Years.

The absolute most important thing to remember when considering sales is to focus only on stuff you actually need or have a direct use for. Buying things you don’t really want merely because they’re on sale is a sure way to put yourself in a worse financial position. If you’re intending to replace a flaky television, for example, now is the time to do it – but if you’re thinking of dumping thousands into upgrading your television by 4″, consider other uses for your money.

The post Your After-Christmas Shopping Checklist appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Tune in tomorrow for our regularly scheduled programming.

The post Merry Christmas from The Simple Dollar! appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Between the wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, tags, and other things, I’ve often spent $20-25 on just wrapping the gifts at Christmastime. This seems silly. How do you wrap presents? I’m sure you’ve got a less expensive way.

To me, the purpose of wrapping paper is simply to disguise gifts from the receiver while at least looking moderately visually interesting – nothing more, nothing less. I don’t see the purpose in spending lots of money on the “perfect” wrapping paper or on elegant ribbons when they’re going to wind up being a big pile of trash on Christmas morning.

Instead, here’s my Christmas wrapping strategy. All told, I’ll spend about $4 on materials and those materials will provide more than enough for several Christmases.

In the picture above, I’m about to wrap a copy of the video game Nintendogs for my eight year old niece (her parents might read The Simple Dollar, but I’m pretty sure she does not). I’m going to wrap it in plain brown paper, the type you would use for packaging things to mail via the Postal Service or UPS.

You can get an enormous roll of such paper for just a couple dollars. Even better, you can get brown paper at the store by requesting paper bags and trimming off the bottoms of the bags. Starting in about September, I start requesting such bags at the store so that I can give the bags a second life.

Here it is, all wrapped up. A little secret: I took pictures of several presents being wrapped and this one turned out the best – I’m not exactly a gift-wrapping expert, even though I’ve done it many times.

This looks fine, but it is a bit drab. Surely, there’s something we can do to color it up a little…

Yarn is what I use. You can buy an enormous amount of it for a very low price (the depicted roll cost less than a dollar) and it adds a certain homespun flair that just isn’t captured with ribbons.

It’s very easy to use yarn to add flair to your package.

To measure the length of yarn, I wrap it around the gift about three and a half full loops, or about seven times the average length of the package. It might be a little long, but you can trim off excess. I prefer to go longer than I need than to go too short.

After I cut off an appropriate length, I spread out the yarn in a straight line on the table, then set the package face-down in the middle of the piece of yarn. I pick up the two ends and…

… loop them together like so. Then, I turn the package over, tie a simple bow on the front (one that can be opened with a good tug, basically the same knot as is used to tie shoes), and I’m finished with the wrapping.

I like the big, floppy bow look – you may not. If you want a shorter bow, just tug on the ends of the bow until the loops are as short as you like, then trim the long ends. You could also use very long ends to make a lot of loops for a more decorative bow, if you’d like.

I personally really like the aesthetics. It calls to mind the old Rodgers and Hammerstiein tune … little brown packages tied up with string / these are a few of my favorite things.

What about the name?

I simply write it on the package in black marker, no fuss, no muss. You may also choose to write it on the back so the front looks undisturbed by the ink – whatever you’d like.

If you use paper bags from the store, the cost of such wrapping is approaching free – you’re using a tiny fractional amount of a roll of tape and of the yarn bundle and that’s all. Even if you’re using a roll of packaging paper, the cost is still far below what one might spend on typical wrapping paper.

Other ideas to consider:

Have grandchildren decorate packages for grandparents. Give them some markers and have them decorate such a package to their heart’s content.

Use the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper for children’s presents. Just save them for a few weeks and you’ll have plenty.

Print your own designs on the brown paper. Measure off a size that your printer can handle and print a design right on the brown paper. This works really well for smaller gifts.

Good luck!

The post How I Wrap Gifts, Christmas and Otherwise appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Here’s the original page if you can’t see the embedded video.

While I was watching it, I was caught up with two strongly conflicting feelings.

At first, I felt happy for the children. Overjoyed children, on some level, always make me feel happy. I’m reminded of the unabashed joy of some of my own childhood moments, plus I can’t help but consider the happiness of my own children, too.

Yet, as I kept watching, the video began to unnerve me. These children were expressing an enormous amount of joy due to receiving an expensive consumer electronics item. I couldn’t help but think of Christmas 1987, where I reacted in a very similar way to receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System. It is still the single strongest memory I have of a childhood Christmas – and I remember the near ecstasy I had when my parents brought that item out of the bedroom.

What brought on such huge anticipation and excitement in a consumer product? For me, there were a lot of factors – friends at school were a big part of it, as were television commercials and, to a degree, my parents played along as well. They would encourage me to mark things that I wanted out of toy catalogues, for example, and I can remember drawing many, many circles around the Nintendo that year.

The end result? I spent more than a month in a fever pitch of anticipation about Christmas, hoping I would receive a particular item, and I was in an intensely excited frenzy when Christmas morning finally arrived. It was an emotional crescendo – and, frankly, it was the exact way that Nintendo’s marketing department hoped it would end, with a huge rush of happiness associated with that consumer product. Is it really a coincidence that our home currently has several Nintendo products in it? Likely not.

When I see those children in fits of ecstasy, I see children beginning to assign happiness to consumer goods – and that worries me. For most of my early adulthood, I did that very same thing – I convinced myself that my happiness was directly connected to what material items I had. I’d buy things and barely use them because of the rush of owning that product, and I’d quickly buy into marketing plans of all kinds. In some ways, I still do.

So this leaves the question: how can I tie together these scenes of Christmas delight with my own conflicting desires as a parent? Obviously, I want to create happy childhood memories for my kids and I also want them to actually have at least some of the things that they desire, but I also don’t want to create the type of emotional association with things that these kids are developing – and that I once developed. Here are my thoughts.

First, I won’t encourage my children to ask for anything for gifts. This discourages obsessing over Christmas lists and the like. Instead, I’ll just focus on paying attention to them – what are their interests? What are they passionate about? This requires more footwork, but it also stymies a focus on consumerism.

Next, I’ll work diligently to create positive memories with my child that aren’t associated with consumer products. Instead of leaving my children to their own ends – or spending time with them focused on consumerism – I’ll try hard to create happy memories that don’t revolve around things. I’m already actively doing this with my children – in just the last few days with my son, for example, he’s helped me make supper, we’ve played catch, we’ve wrestled in the living room until he’s laughing his head off, and we’ve also read a pile of library books together.

Finally, I want to reinforce in my children the power of giving over receiving. My childhood was often centered around the stuff I could get – there was very little focus on giving to others. We did not write thank you notes for gifts, nor was I ever really encouraged to think about giving to others, either in terms of charities or to loved ones for gift-giving occasions. I feel that this attitude contributed greatly to my financial problems in early adulthood, and I fully intend to work to implant different values in my own children.

I want my children to have a thoroughly happy and fulfilling childhood, but every time I watch that video, I feel that long term happiness is somehow being traded for the short term. That’s not a trade I want to make with my own children – there is a different way, and I intend to find it.

The post Children, Christmas, and the Materialism Battle appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As for me, hopefully I’m taking a big Christmas nap in a comfortable spot somewhere.

Hope you have a very merry Christmas! Please share your favorite Christmas gift (either given or received) in the comments.

See you tomorrow!

The post Merry Christmas from The Simple Dollar appeared first on The Simple Dollar.