There’s only 9 more days ’till Christmas. Excited, happy and relaxed, right? WRONG! You’d be in the mood of the holiday except you’re stressed to the limits by trying to find presents for everyone. Don’t empty your wallet, Be Creative!

Homemade Ice Cream

Mmmmm…….. I’d just start eating that right-
Oh yeah, the recipe. Make a big batch of homemade ice cream for everyone to enjoy, and everyone will forget their presents and drool all over their new favorite dessert.

There are many varieties of recipes, but they all come down to the five basic necessities:

1. Cream- Without this it’d just be plain old ice
2. Sugar- Seriously, who wants bitter ice cream?
3. Milk- Wow, cream and milk. Lactose intolerants beware.
4. Egg Yolks- Eww, they put egg yolks in ice cream?
5. Flavoring- Variety is the spice of life. So put some spice in your ice cream.

Heat about 4 cups of heavy cream a cup and a bit of milk in a pan then add in some flavoring (vanilla works fine) and a heaping half cup of sugar. Separate the egg yolks and mix them with another heaping half cup of sugar. Add some of the cream/milk to the egg stuff and then mix it all in the pan. Make sure it doesn’t boil. After this is all done, chill it for about 10 minutes and then comes the fun part. You need a large container filled with ice and a smaller one that will fit in the large container that will hold the ice cream. There’s plenty of containers like this that you can buy, including some shaped like balls that you can throw. Roll, throw or shake it. It doesn’t matter, just keep it moving. There’s a bunch of science about how this makes the ice cream, if you’re interested read about it Here on Wikipedia. If this doesn’t excite you, you can buy a boring ice cream maker that will do it for you in the freezer. This recipe should serve 15 people, but it’ll taste so good you could eat it all yourself, though i don’t recommend it.

Home-made Ornaments

Those Tree ornaments seem so complicated, no-one could make them on their own. WRONG!

Ornaments are easy to make, though not the glass part. Round, clear bulbs can be bought for cheap at art supply stores or the crafts section at Wal-Mart. Once you have one, you can do almost anything with it to personalize it. Relatives will put your custom-made ornament up every year and remember you.

1. Paint it- Pour acrylic paint inside, and swirl it around to your liking. Wait till it dries before trying a different color. Paint a personal message preferably with the year in it before you paint other colors, so it’s visible on the outside.

2. Fill it- Make something and put it inside. Make a small felt Santa that will dance whenever the ornament is picked up, or put colored foam letters in that spell Christmas. A particularly pretty idea is to put a feather or frayed cloth in the ornament.

3. Glue it- add glitter glue to the outside, or just glue and add particles to it. Use clear or white glitter to make a snow affect.

Personal Drawings

Nothing is cherished more than a picture drawn by a loved one. Your mother can hang up a picture of her and say “My son drew that, and he’s the best person in the world”. The hard part is finding a good picture. Don’t ask them for a picture of them you can draw, that will definitely tip them off. Find a good picture of them, smiling, but not posing. For those not so artistically inclined, a good photograph of you and the loved one with a nice frame will make them smile just as much.

Never-Ending box

A fun present that’s great for making unwrapping presents a little more entertaining is the Never-Ending box.  All you need is a bunch of cardboard boxes that fit into each other and lots of wrapping paper.  Be creative! put ribbons on or cover a box in many layers of tissue paper. Put in implements of destruction in different parts of the structure to help out with opening the next box. In the smallest box place a small item. The best is a note, preferably with a poem. “The best presents come in small packages, but this one was too small to fit any of the good ones in.”

Personal T-shirt

This costs a little bit more, but is easy to do. Find a picture and/or saying that means a lot to the relationship between the giver and the getter. Buy some iron-on t-shirt paper and print it out. Keep in mind that anything white in the picture will become the color of the t-shirt. When ironing, keep the paper in the same place and make sure you have something between the front of the t-shirt and the back so the colors don’t bleed through. When you’re done let it cool and dry.

All pictures via Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons