frazzled JOY: Lots O Gifts

Do you have a large group of people you need to get gifts for? Employees, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, friends. How do you keep it fair? How do you do it without breaking the bank? How do you make it personal? I may have told you that I am the director of our church's mother's day out. I have 27 employees that I buy gifts for. This is quite overwhelming for me. So, how do I do it?

My first tip would be set a budget, an overall max budget and a per person budget. This makes it easy to narrow the gift down, and keeps you from breaking the bank.

My second tip - taken from directors past - is to buy everyone the same thing. This eliminates a lot of stress of trying to find 27 individual gift that fit the person and that stay within your budget.

Third - find a way to make it personal.

Fourth - pay attention to the presentation.

The first two are pretty self-explanatory, but the last two take a little more thought. Here is what I came up with this year {and yes, we had our Christmas party a couple of days ago so they have all already received their gifts}.

I started with a stack of CD's {check out the title *JOY*!!}

And some silver ornaments + some sparkle

The ornaments are the unbreakable kind for crafting, and the sparkle came from the scrapbooking section - stickers.

So, the first step was to apply the stickers - lovely, blingy, initials. This was my way of making the gift personal this year.

Second, I tied some bows. I have used this sheer ribbon for years - no wire but it looks pretty no matter what you do with it and it's inexpensive. I then hot glued the bows to the neck of the ornament. I used more of the sheer ribbon to make a loop to hang the ornament with.

Next came the packaging. Because of the colors on the CD {and a little bit of my laziness} I opted not to wrap them. I found more sheer ribbon in the gift wrap section of HL, this time red. Sticking with the red and white/silver color scheme, I added some candy canes.