This past Christmas, based on the suggestion of my sister, we made little Christmas Gift Baskets for each of our family units. We filled them with decorated sugar cookies, popcorn balls, cake balls, spice cookies, tomato basil soup, and of course candy canes! We had planned bread and brownies, but they fell thru. The brownies we had no time for, and the bread, well....we had to saw it with a hacksaw just so the birds could peck out the interior.
Now money was tight, so we became frugality's bee-och. We bought our baskets from the local Dollar Tree, having had appropriate heart attacks after seeing basket prices at arts and crafts stores (Jo-Anne's, I'm calling you out!). We also bought the plastic wrap to tie our baskets in from the dollar store, having calculated that taping two pieces together would save us $2.
We deliberately chose to make bread as flour at our local Wegmans had been on sale for .99, and it would make a good presentation. The fact that I love to bake homemade bread and that people LOVE homemade bread are obviously factors. Soup was made with canned tomatoes $1.09 (the cost of basil was HIGH though). Both types of cookies were made with white flour, and the cake balls made with a pre-packaged mix. Popcorn was a big saviour in terms of cost. A few tablespoons of ol' poppin corn and a few creamy caramels and we were in business.
Now I do have to mention that we had colored chocolate melts lying around the house, tubs of frosting, sugar, and food coloring.
I will post each item we placed in these baskets separately or this should be a very looong post indeed!
Forgive the picture, my camera sucks!
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