Christmas with my family is always fun. I have two sisters, that each have two kids. They are all grown with kids of their own that are at least teenagers, so we have no small kids with mountains of gifts to open any more. The adults stopped exchanging gifts years ago, so this year we decided to do a White Elephant Gift Exchange to liven things up. We agreed to do this at Thanksgiving.
These types of gift exchanges are quite popular at offices and other small groups, around the holidays. If you have never participated in a White Elephant Gift Exchange, these are the rules: |
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This is a little box I make whenever I can in lieu of wrapping a gift. It's less waste, and cuter too! Below I have an tutorial on how to make this little box. I don't provide a pattern because the size of the box will depend on the item you are wrapping; it has to fit in the middle. You can see in the shape below that I traced out after making a paper pattern from the object I am going to wrap. I was reading my Facebook wall this morning and I ran across a post by Evelyn Saenz. It said that most people have been using aluminum foil and plastic wrap wrong, their whole life! I am like....huh? What it actually meant was, we have not been removing it from the box properly, and causing ourselves unnecessary annoyance. Check out the video below, and you will see what I mean: Unbelievable, eh? I have gone my entire life never knowing about those tabs on the side of foil and plastic wrap boxes! /FACEPALM Did you know about them? Why haven't they ever put them in a commercial? Useful information in a commercial??!! Ridiculous! Well, I have done my kindness to humanity today by imparting this vital information that has been hidden from us for so long. Have a great day! Jade :)
I was looking around on the website Hometalk looking at all the really cool crafts and home decor ideas. I do this a couple times a week, I would do it more but I can't afford the time. I could spend hours on that site, love their innovative posts!
But, I digress. During my travels on Hometalk, I saw one of the cutest, and simplest ideas that I have seen in years. I just lit up! I immediately emailed Lisa, of The Pennington Point website and asked her if I could feature her idea here on Homemade by Jade. I just had to share it with you all, it is adorable!
When I was a kid, I had a friend named Mandy, whose grandmother had a party for her every Christmas. It was a very special party, you see, because we got to decorate Christmas cookies! Each child got three cookies to decorate, one for their mom, one for their dad and one for themselves. It was so fun! There were all kinds of shapes: trees, stars, reindeer, gingerbread men, bells and more. It was always so hard to decide on the three you wanted! I've always loved egg nog. When I was a kid, we never had it very much, my parents always said it was too expensive. I am not sure why my mother never made it from scratch. I remember Mom coming home from the grocery store around Christmas time and taking that festive carton out of the bag. We would beg to have some, but we always had to wait until after dinner, when we would enjoy it together as a family.
This year I decided to try something new for the holidays. I have always loved caramels, but I have always kind of shied away from trying to make them because I thought it would be difficult and kind of a pain.
I ran across an recipe for caramels in my late mother's old church cookbook. It didn't seem to tough, only four ingredients! I had to try it! Let me tell you, the caramels were fantastic, melt in your mouth delicious. The recipe was not hard to make at all. The worst part was waiting 8 hours for it to set up! |
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