We love giving heartfelt, homemade gifts, or gifts purchased from small family-owned or local businesses. Whether you want to make your own gifts or buy them this year, here are our best suggestions for Christmas gifts for the homesteader in your life.
Christmas can either be a highly stressful time, with a lot of pressure and obligation, or it can be an enjoyable time spent with family and friends, free from obligation and stress.
Commercialization can steal the true joy of Christmas if we’re not careful. It’s so important to remember “the reason for the season”, which is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
There have been years in the past where we’ve tried to buy presents for each person in our family from every person in our family. If you do the quick math, that’s over 100 gifts for our immediate family alone! Not including Grandmas and Grandpas!
A couple of years ago we started a new tradition where each person draws one name and makes or buys one special heartfelt gift for that person. That way everyone gets a gift, but the gift-receiving isn’t what drives the holiday.
This really gives each child the opportunity to think hard about what the receiver would love, and to take the time to craft something special for that person.
Rules for Gift Giving Made Simple
- Simplify – you don’t need to give every single person a gift.
- No junk of tchotchkes – instead, we want to make or find gifts that are practical, useable, or edible.
- Give experiences – this is a fantastic way for a family to get a membership to a museum, a theme park, get music or horseback riding lessons, or another form of entertainment or education.
- Try to make wrapping sustainable – for us, we only need a few things: shipping paper (or fabric), cotton string or jute twine, gift tags, and some pretty evergreen tree clippings and cinnamon sticks.
Everything we wrap our gifts with can typically be tossed into the compost pile, shredded to use as bedding for the animals, or reused (such as a mason jar). - Work toward homemade gifts – This isn’t an end-all rule, but it truly is special when a gift is homemade and heartfelt from the giver, especially if it’s something the receiver truly needs/wants.
- Support Small/Family-Owned Businesses – Remember, the goal is to simplify, and sometimes making a homemade gift just isn’t simple! When this is the case, we love to help support small or family-owned businesses (especially when we’ve tried, used, and LOVED the products ourselves!)
Homemade Gift Ideas
Homemade gifts are incredible and can be so special for both the giver and the receiver. They can bring your family together while you work to make the gifts, and they can be the most special gift received. The following are some of our favorite gifts to make:
- Homemade cookie platter – get the littles in the kitchen to help you bake up batches of your favorite holiday cookies (be sure to include these homemade coconutties and these easy Christmas cookies!). Arrange a few of each kind on a platter, wrap it in pretty fabric and tie it with some twine!
- Baskets of home-canned food – We share a free training on how to can your own homemade tomato soup. If you make up a dozen or so jars, bake up some loaves of bread, then you can place a jar of soup and a loaf of bread in a basket and gift a dinner! A night off from cooking is a fantastic gift.
- Homemade beeswax wrap – This is a super fun project for the kids. But you may want to supervise as it can get a little messy! I have a video tutorial all about how to make your own beeswax wrap.
- Homemade wreaths – with just a simple frame made out of pine branches or grapevines (or an inexpensive wire wreath form) and some cut pine branches and pine cones, you can easily make a beautiful, gift-worthy homemade wreath.
- Homemade Christmas Garland – a great, inexpensive, fun craft made with tree branches, ribbons, and twinkle lights.
- Homemade toiletries – Homemade sugar scrub, lotions, soaps, and rose facewash can all be great gifts to give. Scent them with some holiday essential oils and they’re extra special this time of year.
Family Owned & Small-Business Gift Ideas
Although we love giving homemade gifts, we also love to put together an assortment of our favorite products in a little gift bag.
Thankfully, many of these products go to help support small, family-owned and operated businesses (and we even have some discounts that we were able to get for you!).
One idea that combines the family-owned and homemade gift ideas would be homemade tinctures or herbal remedies. Farmhouse Teas has a page of our favorites which includes our kit for Carolyn’s Herbal Remedies course that walks you through how to make your own elderberry syrup, tinctures, oxymels, herbal steams, compresses, and more!
- Made On Hard Lotion – use code “homesteadfamily” for $5 off orders of $25 or more.
- SmallTown Kids Candles and Soaps – use code “3KIDS” at checkout for free shipping on orders of $40 or more.
- Farmhouse Teas Gift Sets – check out some of our favorite teas, as well as herbal kits for our Herbal Medicine Cabinet course.
- Homestead Iron – use code “homesteadingfamily” for 10% off all orders!
- Clydes Garden Planner – use code “HOMESTEADINGFAMILY.COM” for 10% off all garden planner orders.
- GreenStalk Verticle Planter – use code “homesteadingfamily” for $10 off.
- The Made From Scratch Life by Melissa K. Norris
- Gardening When It Counts
- Milk Cow Kitchen
- The Resilient Farm and Homestead
- Introduction to Permaculture
- More Homesteading Family Book Recommendations
Wrapping Supplies
Don’t forget your gift wrapping supplies like brown craft paper, this cute red and white “candy cane” cotton twine, rustic brown Jute twine, or brown craft paper gift tags.
