Okay, here are some AWESOME gift ideas, sent in by MoMommy!
Perfect for grandparents!
This is an easy and cheap (maybe too cheap) gift for grandparents: a "year in retrospect" photo album. You can buy a small album and include photos of your year's major events -- the trip to the zoo, the birthday parties, the Easter bonnets, the day you went sledding at Old Man's Hill... This is also good for out-of-town relatives who can't make it home for the holidays. Or, here's a twist: put together a small "Christmas Day 2007" photo album, with pictures just from that day. If you're really ambitious, you can include little quotes (famous quotes or quotes from the day) along with the photos. Write them out in calligraphy, or just print them up in a pretty font. This is good for any damn day! Like "A Day At The Park," or "A Day Making Cookies," or whatever. Grandparents *love* this stuff.
Perfect for grubby hands!
This is a clever, very cheap idea for toddler-age nieces & nephews -- or even for school-age kids and pre-teens who are into "decorating" their own rooms/walls/bulletin boards. We print extra photos of everyone in the family, cut them out and make collages on construction paper. Then we laminate the sheets and give them to the kiddos. They can carry them around, bend them, drool on them, crumble graham crackers all over them, and the pictures remain unharmed. The kids in our family have always loved looking at photos of people they know. They cherish these sheets (at least for a few months)!
Not necessarily a Christmas gift, but perfect all the same
This is a good gift for a wedding or a housewarming, as well as a unique and inexpensive Christmas idea. Take the recipient's last name (e.g., "Shank"). Go around their/your hometown, preferably to famous sites, and take photos of each letter (e.g., the "S" in the Busch Stadium sign; the "A" in the Gateway Arch in St. Louis). Print them out and put them in a frame with the appropriate number of spots.
And let's all be grateful to el-e-e, who is pretty and helpful and prepped this for posting. I love all of the bloggy help!
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4 comments:
How funny, as I am totally in the middle of doing that letters in photos thing for a couple of my sisters. I'm having lots of fun with it! Those are all fun ideas!
Also another idea we're doing (that we started on my daughter's first birthday but have now migrated it to Christmas gifts) is a photo montage on a dvd for all of our family members. We do it so that each year of each of the kids is broken into a "chapter" on the dvd, and it's just a bunch of photos set in motion to a bunch of songs we've picked out. You can download free photo montage software online and you just plug in the pictures you want to use and wha-la! Everybody loves getting these... especially now that we live long distance. And our kids of course, love to watch themselves on tv as we look back over the years!
We're burning DVDs, too, of our home movies from the year, for the g'parents and great-aunts. Easy as pie. Good idea, Heather, to make it all fancy with music (and free software)!
Online digital photo developers (like Snapfish) usually have options to make photos into books. Actual printed books, like art books. They can be medium-expensive, depending on how many pages you want, but they're hardcover and impressive. They start at something like $6-20, depending on the size of book. I'm thinking of trying that: there's a discount for duplicate copies, so you can get one for yourself and then order more copies for grandparents, aunts, etc.
Thanks to MO Mommy's posting about this on her site as well as here I have been inspired to create a book for my (year old)nephew for Christmas. I got my brother to secretly burn me a copy of their photos on DVD and I've sorted through them to find pictures of his grandparents and aunts,uncles and cousins on both sides (we have a small family). On one page is a picture of the relative(either with him or alone)with a caption like "Here's Auntie Chraycee" then on the next page a pic of him doing someting (like sitting with a book, or in his highchair with food all over his face) and a positive caption like "Auntie Chraycee loves reading books with Max." or "Auntie Chraycee know that Max will grow up big and strong because he eats his vegetables."
You know, I'm trying to reinforce good behaviors. Only trouble is that I don't have a one year old myself, so am a little short for positive messages........I went with what they have pictures for...
1. helps do chores around the house
2. is kind to animals
3. eats all his dinner/eat veggies
4. enjoys taking his bath
5. knows the value of a good nap
6. is an excellent snuggler
7. loves reading books
8. uses his imagination to invent fun games
9. is brave and ready for adventure
10. plays well with others
11. is always making new friends
12. is a good friend
There are only twelve of us, but some of these seema bit lame.....any ideas on other positive messages
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