What a hectic month!
(*Image taken from Microsoft clipart)
As usual, every year in December, hubby and I will get busy cracking up our heads thinking of what gifts to give his business clients for Christmas. I have only started taking pictures of the gifts from 2008 and it was also the year we mostly DIY and made the gifts ourselves. We thought that it would be a nice gesture, with the added personal touch and feel to the gifts.
For 2008's Christmas, we bought some 3 feet tall Christmas tree, bought tons and tons of sweet treats ranging from mini packets of M&Ms, Toblerones, mini packets of raisins, and not to forget mini packs of junk foods. (yes, yes, what an unhealthy choice of food!) I still remember hubby telling me someone in the elevator asked him whether the gift is for sale and whether he could order one too! (while hubby delivered the gifts personally to one of his clients)
Hubby set up the tree and prepared the box for the base while I helped out in stapling each and every treats to a wool string before hanging them to the tree branches and decorating them at the same time. Mind you, I was 7 months pregnant with Ben at the time, so it was quite a feat to be doing all this decoration then!
For 2009's Christmas, still not too far from previous year's sweet treats, hubby thought that we should give the sweet treats in a candy jars. So we bought some glass candy jars from Ikea, bought some Famous Amos cookies, bought tons of sweet treats again and stuff everything into the glass jars and wrapped them up in a nice fluffy red ribbons.
For this year's Christmas gifts, hubby and I thought of sticking to the same sweet treats idea but with a bit of a twist, in the sense that I baked some cookies as part of the Christmas treats. The original idea was for me to bake enough cookies to fit into 2 biscuit tins (1 large, 1 small) but after baking a few batches which could only fit into 2 big and 2 small tins, I gave up and told hubby it was really tiring and hectic for me to be doing all those baking with Ben around. As much as I wanted to bake all those cookies, I really had to accept the fact that I simply can't take this challenge...
In the end, hubby asked me whether we could put the few batches of cookies I made into all the smaller size tins while we put sweet treats into the bigger tins. I mulled over the idea and thought it's a good solution in the sense that all the clients will still get to try my cookies (although they are all squeezed into the smaller tins) and we are still able to give both the big and small biscuit tins to each clients at the same time.
Picture below are some of the bigger size biscuit tins which I stuff all the sweet treats like M&Ms, Toblerones, Cloud 9, marshmallows (4 different flavors), Cadbury's & Merci chocolate, and many more which I can't remember. My head was only thinking 'I've gotta stuff all this in! I've gotta stuff all this in!'
And this is a shot of one of the smaller size biscuit tins, packed with my Shortbread Shape cookies. I packed about 6-10 cookies into each individually sealed plastic pouch so that it's easy for the clients to just take 1 pack instead of opening and closing to take a few and then letting the air into the tins making the cookies lose their freshness and crispness.
For the wrapping part, I stacked the smaller tin on top of the bigger tin and then I tied them with the fluffy red ribbons. Noticed how the ribbons ended at the smaller tins? Creative eh?
As for the greeting card to the clients, hubby came up with the Christmas greetings which I then copied and paste the text onto a template I downloaded from Microsoft. I then printed out the text greetings using color printer onto some A4 size papers. To give them an added ooompfhh with a tougher feel, I decided to recycle some greeting cards we got in exchange for a donation to a charity organisation. I cut the required size and glued the greetings to the recycled greeting cards. I even got Ben to help me glue some of the greetings text.
And this is how the final gift looks like!I present to you,
Christmas gifts for 2010!!
I don't think I will dare to attempt such a big scale of baking at any moment now, especially when Ben still needs my attention most of the time as I could only do my baking when he is taking his daytime nap (about 2-3 hours) or when there is someone taking care of him (such as hubby and my niece, Bonnie who helps out a great deal watching over Ben when she spends her daytime at our place after school).
In summary, it took lots and lots of planning and co-operation from the entire family members to play their part in order to produce this year's Christmas gifts. I would say, it was tiring but it was well worth it.
Now the next thing on the list to do is to get Christmas gifts for our 10 nieces and nephews (ranging from 3 year old to 16 years old) and our dearest Benjamin...
Time to crack our heads again...
