Homemade Christmas Gift Idea ~

I wanted to post these little treats that I made for our kids teachers for their Fall parties...You'll have to overlook the fact that they are in fall containers and such and just imagine what they would look like if in Christmas containers...but I wanted to be able to give an idea of how you can make some super cheap, really sweet gifts...and since I do not have the Christmas ones made yet...I thought you could at least get the idea...hope this helps. I plan on posting some more gift ideas soon too, so stayed tuned for more ideas.

If your pantry is starting to look mine than you probably have lots of brownie mixes and lots of rice crispies and lots of cookie mixies that you got for super cheap or maybe even free...gotta love that! Well, it's time to start thinking about how to make those things into frugal homemade gifts.

First decide what kind of gifts you are going to make as you will need to start looking for containers. I try and think ahead and purchase these kind of things on clearance throughout the year when I see them. But I have found that the Dollar Store and Michael's always seem to have a nice selection at fairly decent prices. (The chinese style take out containers youe see below were bought at Michael's.)I made some rice crispy treats and cut them into squares...then I put them out wax paper and drizzled them with chocolate topping them off with some fall sprinkles, think red/green/white sprinkles or snowman sprinkles. Then I filled the bottom of a clear sack with candy corn...for Christmas think crushed peppermint, holiday corn, red hots, etc. Then I tied the bags off with some ribbon...think red, green, sparkly ribbon.

You can also have fun with you rice crispies by adding food coloring to them...here is some I made for St. Patty's Day...but you could make them green (add the coloring to your marshmallow mixture) and cut them into wreaths using a round cutter and then cutting out another smaller round hole in the center forming a wreath :-) add red hots for the lights and voila...a rice crispy wreath.The next thing I did was make some brownies (these were the Betty Crocker cookie bar brownies) and did the same thing as the treats...placed them on waxed paper, drizzled in chocolate and topped with sprinkles. Now...I use Almond Bark coating for the drizzle (either chocolate or white chocolate) for one reason...it will set up hard once dry...making it much easier to package...plain melted chocolate will not set hard and it will smear once packed. If all you have is plain chocolate, you could add some Gulf Wax to help it set up.
Once the chocolate had set up, I wrapped each brownie in plastic wrap as seen below...I then inserted a piece of tisue paper into a chinese style take out container that had a fall pattern...for Christmas I have seen some with really cute patterns like snowman, reindeers, snowflakes and Santa. Once the tissue paper was in, I added the brownies.After I had the containers packaged, I took a sharpie marker and added the teacher's names and my children's names and tied some fall ribbon around the handle. Again...think Christmas ribbon for this time of the year...make it really festive :-)