Putting Thoughtful Christmas Gift Baskets Together

Some people tend to think of Christmas gift baskets as copout gifts – that you just put a few on special things together when you can't think of anything special, and you hope that no one will notice that you're trying to make up for a lack of quality with quantity. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

There are plenty of people who actually wish they would get gift baskets for Christmas. There's just something really exciting about opening a hamper full of thoughtfully arranged goodies. Now you certainly could buy Christmas gift baskets – and they wouldn't be expensive. Sometimes though, you can put it off for too long; and then, it's too late to expect them to deliver at the right time. What do you do then?

Well, as you can probably imagine, you could, with a little care and attention paid, put Christmas gift baskets together yourself.

In fact, you just could do a better job than the professional retailers, designing Christmas gift basket yourself. Because you know the people that you're buying for. You know what they might like.

If you're putting a chocolate gift basket together for Nana, and you know that she just hates chocolates with raisins in them or chocolates made by a certain company, it might be difficult to find a ready-made basket on the market that exactly complied with these little quirks. And of course, you could put gift baskets together this way that would be very difficult to actually find at any retailer's.

If you have a car nut to buy a gift for, you could put a car care gift basket together; if someone's a culinary nut, a gift basket full of fine kitchen implements could be great. If someone loves brainteaser puzzles, that could be an idea. Or how about reading baskets – full of five or six of the latest bestsellers?

And oh, as an added bonus, if you go about it right, you might actually save a bit of money. All you need to do is to find a nice basket at a thrift store or crafts store, fill it with the right goodies, and then go to town decorating it.

If you've seen the movie Love Actually, you probably remember how in the store, Rowan Atkinson drives a furtive and hurried shopper buying a present for his secret lover crazy, by taking his time decorating the packaging with just about every kind of silly decorative flourish, possible – a scoop of candy, holly, cinnamon sticks and what-not.

That's just the kind of fun that you can have with the actual giftwrapping. It can be a barrel of fun when you have all this festivity that you wish to convey in a Christmas gift basket.