10 Homemade Christmas Gifts
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Christmas gift shopping is a genuine source of stress for many, so these 10 homemade Christmas gifts — easy to put together, and full of personal touch — have become the go-to for the past few years.
Christmas gifts bring real pressure, mostly because shopping around this time of year is genuinely dreaded. Homemade Christmas gifts have always been the preferred route instead. This post pulls together 10 easy-to-make homemade Christmas gifts, meant to add that extra personal touch for loved ones.
Christmas here means time with family and friends, good food, and genuine relaxation over the holidays. The pressure of gift exchanges can get overwhelming with so many ideas floating around, which is exactly why homemade and handmade gifts have become the standard for the past several years — no mall crowds, no parking queues, none of the usual shopping stress. Here are the 10 Christmas gift ideas that came together this year.
Table of Contents
1. Homemade Jams and Jellies from Garden Produce
Having a garden is genuinely practical, with an organic bounty of berries coming in through the summer months. Since it’s impossible to eat it all at once, the extra produce gets preserved as jams, pickles, and jellies. Food is always a safe gift bet too, with no real worry about health and safety, provided everything’s made under properly sterile conditions — otherwise preserves spoil quickly. Everything gets sterilized before the jars are filled, and friends and family get a genuine taste of the garden through these preserves.
2. Homemade Berry Infused Vinegar
A bountiful sea buckthorn harvest this year, with a couple of berry-infused vinegar recipes shared in that post, made for an ideal Christmas gift, since vinegar is a regular addition to salad dressings and other cooking here. These bottles are inexpensive and pretty enough to gift as-is — upcycled bottles work just as well too.
3. Homemade Applesauce
Another great harvest of organic apples this year, a variety especially suited to sauces and chutneys, led straight to more homemade applesauce, with a full tutorial already on the blog. Applesauce works well in baking or eaten plain — warming up the canned batch with a few raisins and some coconut makes for a genuinely light, sugar-free dessert.
4. Homemade Christmas Cookies
The start of Advent means baking a whole rotation of cookies and biscuits, with extra batches made specifically to go into Christmas gifts — an easy, low-effort way to check another homemade gift off the list. A few favorites worth trying: Christmas orange drop biscuits, a hot favorite with a daughter who’s been helping bake them since age 3, especially loving the icing part — she used to get her own separate batch to decorate for hygiene reasons, but she’s old enough now to understand why tasting mid-bake isn’t part of the process. Also worth a try: crunchy coconut oat biscuits, which can be made vegan too.
5–8. Cake, Body Butter, Lip Balms, and Candles
Supplies List
- 1. Jams & jellies
- 2. Berry infused vinegar
- 3. Homemade applesauce
- 4. Christmas cookies
- 5. Christmas cake
- 6. Whipped body butter
- 7. DIY lip balms
- 8. DIY candles
- 9. Kitchen utensils & towels
Instructions
5. Christmas Cake:
Christmas wouldn’t feel complete without this Christmas fruit cake, baked and gifted for well over 2 decades now. Friends and family genuinely expect it every year at this point — the recipe hasn’t been changed since one attempt at tweaking it didn’t go over as well. Bake it 3 weeks ahead of time, pack it into portions, and it fits right into any gift basket — genuinely one of the best homemade Christmas gift ideas around.
6. Homemade Whipped Body Butter:
Sharing time-tested homemade cosmetics has become a more recent addition to the blog, including a homemade whipped body butter recipe. Since Christmas falls right in the middle of winter, when skin needs extra moisturizing, giving homemade cosmetics instead of shop-bought ones just makes sense — a real hit with natural-loving friends. It comes together easily with just a few basic ingredients. Filled into pretty little glass jars with a ribbon tied on, it’s ready for any Christmas gift basket, and printable labels are available in that blog post too.
7. DIY Lip Balms:
DIY lip balms make an ideal homemade Christmas gift and a great filler for any gift basket. Around this time of year, many friends are out skiing or sledging, and chapped lips tend to follow — a genuinely thoughtful gift they’ll actually treasure.
8. DIY Candles:
Another safe Christmas gift idea. Artificially scented commercial candles were never really appealing, which led to making candles at home instead — good quality beeswax candles run genuinely expensive in Switzerland too. Candle making turns into a fun activity with kids, with the added bonus of mixing custom essential oil blends.
9. Kitchen Utensils and Kitchen Towels
9. Kitchen Utensils and Kitchen Towels. Not exactly homemade, but too useful a gift category to leave out — everyone appreciates a genuinely handy tool in their kitchen. Another variation worth considering: sewing something special, like table runners, aprons, or cushion covers, and gifting those instead. Plenty of ideas exist beyond these 10, but this feels like a good place to stop.
A Few Homemade Gifting Tips
Sterilize everything for food gifts: jams, jellies, and preserves need properly sterile conditions, or they’ll spoil quickly.
Bake extra batches during Advent: doubling up on Christmas cookies means gifts are sorted with barely any extra effort.
Don’t mess with a beloved recipe: sticking with the same Christmas cake recipe for over 2 decades has kept friends and family looking forward to it every year.
Reuse or upcycle containers: old bottles and jars work just as well as new ones for gifting homemade preserves and cosmetics.
Watch the Video
Your feedback is valuable
Did you like these 10 Homemade Christmas Gifts? What are your favorite ideas? Leave me a comment, I’d really love to know! Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below! Thank you so much for visiting Vital Fair Living – we’re so happy you’re here! and thanks for taking the time to read this post. I would love it if you can share this recipe using the social media buttons you see next to the post.
