“Not everyone will like the caramel apple jam,” Sarah commented to me after we made it. As much as I liked it, I knew she was right: it was very sweet and lacked the tartness that I often crave in my jellies and jams.

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.

I often brew homemade beer. It’s an enjoyable hobby that allows me to sometimes use items from my garden and gets me deeply in touch with the natural process of making a homecrafted beer. I have complete control over the ingredients and can make whatever variation seems good to me with whatever ingredients seem flavorful to me.

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.

A few weeks ago, my wife stopped by a roadside stand where an individual was selling apples. A lot of apples. My wife asked if there were any deals, and the seller told her that he would sell her 8 1/2 pounds of “seconds” (apples that had been dropped and needed to be used quickly) for $8. My wife jumped on the bargain and arrived home with a lot of apples in tow.

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.

Let’s just start this one off with two big, giant warnings!

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.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were chatting about some of the best Christmas gifts we’ve ever received.

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.

Each Christmas, a lot of people find themselves in gift exchanges that they don’t really want to participate in. They end up buying gifts for people that they don’t have a close relationship with. They’re obligated to spend more money than they’d like on certain gifts. Sometimes, they’re guilted into it by the expectations of others at their Christmas parties.

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!

A few days after Christmas, Sarah and I will usually head out to the store to stock up on post-Christmas sales. It’s often easy to find many items at bargain-basement prices in the days after Christmas – items which can easily be saved until next year.

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.

I hope that wherever you are and whatever you believe, good tidings are reaching you.

Tune in tomorrow for our regularly scheduled programming.