Are you so busy with other things that you would be willing to pay for a professionally prepared gift basket? Here’s a place where you can find some for reasonable prices;
Holiday Gifts under $30 from 1-800-BASKETS.COM
Have you seen gift towers? You might want to try these;
Gourmet Gift Towers starting at $29.99 from 1-800-BASKETS.COM!
Have you ever received a gift basket filled with goodies and treats? They are marvelous, aren’t they? But when you look at the pre-packed ones in the stores you gasp and back off. They are too expensive! They can range from $50 to $150 or more!
But look at it this way, those small items need not all be so expensive. You are mostly paying for the services of the person who had the pleasure of putting the basket together. You can do it yourself for much less. Perhaps between $10 - 20, if you are frugal.
You can do most of the shopping at a dollar store and your local supermarket.
First decide for whom it will be and what that person especially likes. You can do gift baskets for;
a sick person - with mostly fruits and healthy nibble foods
a baby - with small, cheap stuffed toys and everyday toiletries that are needed daily
a chocoholic - all kinds of chocolate candies, bars, and mixes.
a lover - chocolates, or other treats, and things that can be shared by the two of you.
a hobbyist - (such as a scrapbooker) - supplies for the hobby
a gardener - seeds, gardening gloves, small gardening tools, etc.
a girl absorbed in beauty - makeup, cleansers, soaps, bath accessories and towels.
You will find fairly cheap baskets at the dollar and second-hand stores. We have stores here like Dollarama, the Buck or Two, and Value Village, where you can find wicker baskets of all types. Once you know for whom the basket is and how much you want to limit your spending too, you’ll be able to gauge the size of the basket needed much better.
Shopping comes next. It’s a good idea to take your basket along and tuck in the things as you choose them, and most of them could be chosen right at the dollar stores, or at your usual grocery store. Soon you will see that it is going to be tricky keeping things into the basket, but I’ll tell you what to do.
Be sure to get some large sheets of cellophane, or else a large clear, see-through plastic bag. When you get home, arrange things as nicely as you can in the basket, setting it first on a sheet of cellophane or the center of the plastic bag. Maybe you can tuck in a few Christmas ornaments or silk pointsettias or other seasonal clues.
Ready? Gather up the corners of the wrapping cellophane or bag and bring to the top. Snug it tightly around the whole basket so nothing can tumble around inside. Tuck and tape down extra folds if you need to. Use a twist tie to hold things together at the top.
Prepare a nice big bow or ribbon to tie around the top (over the twist tie). Try to make the size of the bow correspond to the over all size of the basket for a professional effect. (The recipient may never notice if it is not scaled perfectly).
Attach a gift tag if it is going to be spending time among other gifts or people and could be mistaken for someone else. Now your elegant gift basket is ready.
Say, this is fun, isn’t it? Is there time to make another?
In your house you may be doing extra cleaning and decorating and baking by now. Not at my place, I’m afraid. I did take time on Saturday morning to carefully tape some weather-proofing plastic over three of my windows.
I was going to attach a door sweep too on the inside of the front door. That’s a strip of rubber attached to an aluminum strip that you are to screw to the bottom of the door and it will cover the crack where the breezes try to sneak in. Only I ran into a problem with taking off the old one, so I’ve put that aside until someone with more experience gives me advice.
I did sweep and wash floors and tidy up a bit, but mostly I was zeroing in on typing up a cookbook that I want to print up a batch of, and use as Christmas gifts. So mostly I typed or keyed for hours on end. There are still 28 pages left to go, and I’m hoping I’ll be done by this Saturday so I can spend that day printing and binding them. That’s the goal - but whether I accomplish it, that’s another story. 
Watch for progress report next week.
Sunday afternoon was set aside to work on my Christmas mail. I have drafts now of my Christmas letter and the cat story in pictures, (I wish I could get a photo of Snowflake opening a door!) - but both need some polishing. Knowing that it always takes me a long time to address my mail, I’m pushing myself to get this done in early EARLY December so that I have a hope of finishing my mailing before Christmas.
Some of my friends talk about cleaning and decorating and throwing parties or having friends over. Hmmm…. maybe that should be my goal for next year?
This morning I found myself plotting a cleaning and renovating binge between Christmas and New Year’s, so maybe I’ll be ready to have some friends over then.
Hey, I’m not overwhelmed yet, are you?
Oh my, trouble never makes appointments to drop in on us, does it? It never apologizes and says, “I hope I’m not inconveniencing you.” Well, trouble dropped in unexpectedly at my home computer on Friday morning. It visited my office computer here Monday morning too.
I had bought a new external drive which I wanted to use to back up both my home and office computers and be able to carry the extra 500 GB drive back and forth in my backpack. However, when I set it up on each computer I ticked off that I wanted an entry in the “fstab” file so the new drive would be mounted whenever I booted up. The “fstab” file controls a number of things at boot-up. That was a mistake, so even though I was happy to block off partitions for each computer and got a good backup done, when I tried to reboot my home computer on Friday morning - I got stern warnings that my new partitions were not recognized and I had to do a manual repair.
Duh!? What do I need to do to fix that?
I’d left the office computer running, so I had no problems there all day Friday. Went home armed with all the helps I had been able to gather, and yet nothing seemed to work. Not even the Rescue CD that Jondalar had given me on Wednesday.
I drove to the office and downloaded and burned a new operating system to install at home, but it would not work. So I phoned my young geek friend up and asked advice. He walked me through the steps of editing the fstab file from the command line, so the offending three lines were removed. Presto! Then I could reboot and everything was normal again. (Whew! Sigh!)
Well yesterday I came to the office and found the computer had tried to reboot itself, and was frozen or locked up. I had not written down every step Jondalar had guided me through, but I recalled enough so I could go online on another computer and find the answers and do the steps, and sure enough, by 10 am, I was back in business!
What can we do but chalk such experiences up to our learning curve. Sometimes we have to experience something twice to really remember that lesson, right?
I’ve not had any more gift-making suggestions from subscribers, so I think today I will tell you how to prepare and make your own gift books. Sorry, I have no photos ready for this one. 
Making your own gift books, as described below, may not appeal to you one whit! If you would rather someone else had the headaches with hand-making something, but you still like the idea of giving books, you can find some excellent deals at my favourite online Christian Bookstore.
My favourite online Bookstore has; Giveaways,
Great Deals, and
Gifts!
If you are a book lover too, you enjoy receiving books as gifts, and they are often the first idea you have when you want to give gifts to others. I’ve snipped and folded and made little booklets since I was a kid. It seems my Sunday School classes always enjoyed such a craft activity too. Now with some years of experience behind me, and all these new electronic helps we have, it is possible to make some very fine, professional-looking books.
You need a computer with a word-processing program on it, such as MS Word, or OpenOffice.org, and a good quality printer, and a stack of copy paper. I buy it by the case and the occasional ream of cover stock.
A stapler works for binding small or thin books, but if you are doing a bigger project then it is good to have the machines to punch holes and insert the plastic combs called cerlox to bind the pages together. However, if you are doing a short run it should not be hard to drop in at a print or copy shop and ask them to bind them for you. Or, you may have a friend who owns such machines, or who works for a business that has them you can ask a favour. I happen to have some old binding machines from my sister, when she moved away.
Writing and Layout
First you need to write or type up the contents of the book on the computer. Before you begin, you should format the basic page for this document. From the top menu choose “Format” then “Page” and on that screen change the settings so your letter-sized paper will be turned landscape. Set the margins for .4″ or .5″, and set it to two columns with about a 1 inch space between. Click “Okay.”
This will allow you to put two 5.5″ x 8.5″ pages side by side on one side of the sheet of paper, and two more on the other side. That gives you 4 pages per sheet of paper that will go through your printer. Great frugal idea!
Remember, you can insert graphics and pictures, or use fancy fonts in all kinds of sizes. Allow yourself some fun.
Order of Pages
But you need to insure that the right pages will be opposite each other when you lay those sheets together, so you need to work out a pattern for the pages you do. (Or else type them all in the chronological sequence and re-arrange them later - I find that messy though).
Think of it in 4s. Side one of the first sheet will need to have page 4 on the left, page 1, or the cover, on the right. The other side of that sheet will need to have page 2 on the left and page 3 on the right. Grab some scrap paper - even small squares, and fold and number them. If you only want 4 pages to your booklet you can print and fold your sheet and you are done.
If you want more pages, you will have to spend more time on sorting the order of the pages. The next sheet of paper that will lay inside the outer one will also have 4 pages. Let’s say it will be 8 pages in total, then the order of the pages will go more like this;
sheet one = 8 + 1(front cover); other side has 2 + 7,
sheet two = 6 + 3; other side has 4 + 5.
If your book or folio (meaning folded pages making a book) is going to have 16 pages, you can order them like this;
sheet one = 16 + 1; 2+ 15. (1 is your cover)
sheet two = 14 + 3; 4 + 13.
sheet three = 12 + 5; 6 + 11.
sheet four = 10 + 7; 8 + 9. ( the 8 + 9 is your centre spread, so it is possible to use that as one!)
Printing
When you are satisfied with your book of poems, recipes, stories or whatever, it’s smart to print out a copy just for showing to another person or two in case they catch some typos (we never see all of them ourselves) and for you to make sure your pages come out in the sequence they should.
With some printers you can tell it to print each sheet as a page, and some will even turn the page over and print the second side for you. If not, just turn the stack over in your tray and send them through again with another print command. The tricky part here is to make very SURE you are not printing the other side upside down. I always print test sheets until I’m SURE the paper is going into the tray right so it all comes out right before I give it a command to print 20 or 50 copies.
Collating and Binding
Printing all done? Now put the stacks of pages on a table and reach for a sheet from each pile, collating the pages to form the individual books. If you are doing a booklet of 16 pages or less, it’s okay to just fold them. and your books are done. If you are doing more pages you may want to staple them in the middle or see about a cerlox spine to bind them.
The quality of your self-published book will depend mostly on your skills with layout and arrangement of text and graphics. If you want the cover to look more like a book, treat it separately from the rest of the pages, by printing it on heavier cover stock paper and maybe evening having it laminated with a clear plastic coating.
If you want to simplify that page sequence business, just make the pages the full letter sheet size. But of course, then you will have to bind the pages together as the folding option is out.
Experiment and see how many kind of books you can make!