First of all, did you see that I did a 12 Days of Christmas blog event where I managed to get 12 blog post with 12 new crochet patterns done in 13 days?
Although this post is not about that I am very excited about it all – It made me want to share my fun gift baskets that I am so excited to gift and share!! See below the links for 12 Days of Christmas crochet for some fun filled Christmas giving fun!! – or gift giving for any reason! These are some of my gifts for 2019, but stay tuned for 2020!!
I had to miss one day, but you will find 12 new, fun, Christmas themed patterns perfect for quick, stash busting projects in the posts before this one, but if you need a link you can follow Day 12 HERE and go back through – links on Day 12 for the other days. It was so much fun, but tiring! I did manage to use almost my entire stash basket that I had set aside for those projects and that left me with a huge sense of accomplishment. But, it also left me tired and needing a crochet break – so, I set about pulling my gigantic stash of Christmas gifts out and my wrapping commenced!
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First, I am a thrifty, frugal, clearance-rack shopper! I start in January shopping for gifts for the birthdays and Christmas each year. When we were a single income family with 4 small kids under the age of 6, I had very little choice in the matter- but now it is just habit. When I see a clearance sale I immediately think, “okay, will any of this work for gifts/gift baskets?” I start out in January with no fresh ideas and sometimes I just buy stuff on clearance or free with coupons etc and put it away – and then sometimes, one of the deals I find gives me loads of inspiration and a “theme” for my gift.
And that is what I want to share today. My inspiration and my gift ideas in hopes to inspire your gift giving – if you need any that is – As a side note – our kids are now 16, 19, 20 and 22. The 3 older ones are girls and the youngest our boy. As you can imagine, this age is tough to shop for!
What we do in our family now that they are all older is that we shop with an “idea in mind” for one of the other 5 people – we each buy 5 gifts (like a White Elephant) -and then we pick numbers and go around in a circle opening gifts and stealing from each other (Dirty Santa) – so, with 6 of us each bringing 5 gifts -that is 30 gifts- that get swapped and stolen and hopefully end up with the person that we intended them for – we have been known at the end to do some trading =) anyway, we have the best time and I love trying to put together fun gifts. Okay, so let me get to showing you some of where I started and what I did this year.
For this Coffee and Chocolate basket, I started putting it together after I found these super fun coffee mugs at my local thrift store – I could tell that they had never been used because they still had the sticky store tag on the bottom. I also found these travel mugs on clearance. With those two things in mind, I waited to find the perfect large basket on sale at my JoAnn store – they always have great baskets and you can get them all year on and off for 40-70% off. I didn’t start adding food and coffee until around October when my stores and Ibotta rebates started coming in for so many bags of coffee and some of these snacks. For me – free is the best! – after rebates and coupons a lot of the coffee and chocolates were either free or super cheap! I layered the coffees in the back and then packed around it. This was one of those that I didn’t want to do too soon since it had food items.
After getting it all packed in like I liked it, I used my shrink wrap (I get this at the $1 store and it is the best! Use a hair dryer and it shrinks up nice and tight and easy and keeps it all in place). Shrink it up!
I then added a fun towel and oven mitt that I also found at the $1 store and tied it all up with a cute ribbon (I forgot to get the ribbon picture before I packaged this one up in a box.
And that is one gift down! 4 to go….
This next “man basket” came to me as I was cruising through that one isle at Aldi’s that says “get it while you can” because if you don’t it’ll be gone when you go back. They had all this cool “man stuff” and my guys are always outside in the garage and what man doesn’t need “man stuff?”
I shopped several clearance sales for the extras in this one – but, this is the most awesome tool box! I will let the pictures speak for this one….
This one got a big gift bag loaded with tissue paper and is pretty heavy – for that heavy duty guy! 2 down and 3 more to go!
I think this is my favorite – This is the Beauty Box – I actually had so very much of these beauty and cosmetic type things that I did two giant gifts! I am a CVS deal shopper – each week I check out the deals at CVS and all through out the year I get FREE stuff. Yes, FREE! When you shop CVS with coupons, Ibotta rebates, other rebates, CVS Extra Care Bucks etc, it is SO easy to get completely FREE stuff all year long at CVS. Sometimes, they even pay me to take stuff out of the store. So, I shop deals and clearance – as you look at all of this next stuff think about this – I got almost everything in these pictures for either Free, less than $2 or they paid me to take it out of the store. – with I think 1 exception – there was an amazing clearance deal online at Philosophy where I got a huge box of Philosophy items for dirt cheap!
My girls are going to want to fight for this one – maybe – who ever really knows anymore (ha!) ….After carefully packaging up all of these beauty finds in these great gift boxes from Tuesday Mornings, I used some ribbon and a little sweet tag and bam! these are done and ready to give. The deals in these boxes are quite amazing, but this was almost a year long shopping expedition for me where I saved these up (and in addition to this, my 3 girls have tons of extra beauty products and tons of free razors and stuff in their stockings)
Now, this next quick gift was easy and fun….it’s an extra item. We also play a game of Dirty Santa with extended family. I found this huge blow up lounge chair and small throw blanket and took advantage of – again CVS – when they had a gift card deal to Buy $75 worth of Chili’s gift cards and get $25 Extra Care Bucks back – that is $75 for only $50! So, I paired this lounge with the cards and added a “chill” tag to the outside for fun.
Okay, only a few more to go….
This next one might seems dorky – but, what fun is having a White Elephant exchange without a little dorkiness? My “It’s so Hot” pot will surely be a hit!
I was inspired by a grocery store sale, paired with an Ibotta rebate, that got me FREE hot sauce…well, I can only handle so much free hot sauce, so after filling up my pantry, I took the extra and some “hot” foods and added some chili pepper items and a gift card again for Chili’s (it is close to our house and the kids like it) …tossed it all into a “pot” (cheap pot from Walmart) and now I have a “It’s so Hot” gift that will surely cause a few chuckles…
This is the sweetest Bee Happy gift! It all started when I was putting some of my beauty deals away and I realized I had a quite a bit of Burt’s Bees items – I had been seeing an advertisement for some Bee Kind t-shirts on my Facebook newsfeed, so I went to Amazon and started searching for some fun Bee items. I was able to use Ibotta rebates cashed into Amazon gift cards to get most of these fun things for next to nothing!
I packaged this one up in this sweet box from JoAnn’s – again – you can get these gift boxes and baskets year round for 40-70% off so don’t buy them full priced – they always go on sale!
So, after resting up from my 12 Days of Christmas blog event and getting my gifts all done it should be a nice relaxing December – well, except for all my Etsy orders =) I hope you enjoyed some of these ideas. Thank you for visiting me here on my blog. Merry Christmas and see you in the New Year – I have so many big things planned so come back and see me!! <3
