Do you have some "hard-to-buy-for" people on your Christmas list? Are you looking for gift ideas that don't create clutter for the recipient?
One of my most popular posts year round is Gifts in a Jar. In that post I showed how our kids make jar gifts for their teachers. Their teachers love receiving these jars because they are unique and clutter free!
Today, I want to show you the Christmas jars we made last year. Hopefully it will help you fill in a few ideas on your Christmas gift list!
If you're not familiar with the concept of cookies in a jar, read my previous Gifts in a Jar post (and some of the comments) to see what I'm talking about.
First, we started out with some empty jars. Here are the two we used.
The one on the left is a regular mason jar that I bought. And the Christmas lid was a Freecycle find. I love Freecycle! The one on the right is actually a cute plastic container that we had in the house. We measured to make sure it had enough space to hold the ingredients and it did.
We chose to make Sand Art cookies from a book we have called Gifts in a Jar: For Kids.
You can find it online or possibly even at your local library.
Here's my daughter helping measure out the ingredients.
{Please excuse the mess and bottles of medicine in the background... I was sick for most December last year... which is why this post didn't get written then!}
One of the reasons we liked this recipe was that we could easily customize it to make it more Christmasy. All the typical cookie ingredients are included (sugar, oats, brown sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, and chocolate chips) but the recipe also called for M&M's and crisp rice cereal. We used the red and green Christmas M&M's and the Christmas Rice Krispies so that these jars (and eventually the cookies) would be more colourful and festive.
This recipe is a tight fit for a standard mason jar so we made sure we packed the ingredients in tightly. Here's my daughter packing the brown sugar with the back of an ice cream scoop (it works really well with a narrow opening jar!).
Pouring in more ingredients...
And more ingredients...
She did most of the work last year! Here's how they turned out.
I love how the pretty the layers of ingredients look in the jars. You can be as crazy as you want to be to make the layers level but I think the unevenness adds to the charm :)
The next step was to add a tag. There are tags included in the book, but I wanted to make prettier ones to attach to the jars. I created these in Word (just typed up the directions and added a border and some holly clip art) and then printed them on cardstock.
Here they are attached to the jars with some Christmas curling ribbon.
All ready to give away!
If you're looking for an easy-to-make, thoughtful, unique, clutter-free gift this Christmas, consider making gifts in a jar!
There are tons of recipes available online or you can probably even adapt a recipe you already love. Just layer all the dry ingredients and then create a tag with a list of the wet ingredients that the recipient needs to add and include the baking directions.
You don't have to make cookies either. I've seen recipes for muffins, brownies, squares, and even soups.
I haven't chosen our recipe(s) for this year, but we're planning to make jars for the kids' teachers again. These would also make great hostess gifts. Or you can give them to those friends and family members that "have everything". They're even fun for a white elephant gift exchange with co-workers.
Be creative and have fun!
What do you give to the hard-to-buy-for people on your list? Have you made gifts in a jar before? What kind did you make?
Happy organizing!
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