I love homemade gifts – both making and receiving them. Creating and giving a homemade gift requires giving a little of yourself to the other person. You need to think a lot about the other person in the process of making a gift for the - who they are, what they like, what they need, and how they might react to what you’re making for them. The spirit of intention, connection and love is strong in the “homemade” label.
These days I don’t have time to create homemade gifts – or is it that I don’t make the time? – so I resort to buying things that I think the intended receiver of the gift may like. Sometimes I’ll see something and know immediately that it’s perfect for a particular person. Other times it is really hard to find that “right” something. In reality this whole buying process also takes a lot of time (in thought and physically shopping) only we don’t think about this.
Gift giving on the scale expected at Christmas requires planning and organisation, and this year I didn’t achieve either. I left everything to the very last minute (not so unusual I hear my family saying) and then my body decided to slow me down even more. Thank goodness my youngest daughter Mira was around to inspire me from my sick bed. She motivated me to complete a book I had started a few years ago for my one of my sisters. Burning with a temperature I sat at my dining room table surrounded by photos, coloured papers, glues and many other embellishments. I managed to create the final pages of this book so it was ready to give to her thanks to Mira’s ongoing prompting and help.
Today Mira also created a gift which I loved. She bought a gingerbread man (or woman or person?) cookie cutter. She put together all the dry ingredients together in a jar, printed out the recipe on a card and attached it along with the cookie cutter to the jar of dry ingredients. It was like a packaged cake mix all ready to go. I started to think of other recipes that you could do something similar to this. I’ll have to tuck that away for next year.
Christmas is almost upon us and another year of pre-Christmas frenzy will come to an end. When I’m surrounded by family in a few days none of this will matter and with some luck I’ll have another chance to be more organised next year.
Manifesto
05. Every day is now. The present moment.
11. Every day do something for someone else.
16. Every day looking at the order of things gives you power.
![[Facebook]](http://freshnewday.net/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Twitter]](http://freshnewday.net/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Email]](http://freshnewday.net/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
