At Christmastime we really try to tone down the gift-giving, but if we are seeing family or close friends at Christmas then we usually put together something homemade to share with them.  For example, last year we gave people a printed copy of our favourite recipes in a “booklet” format along with a couple of our favourite teas.  It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was us, and we hope they appreciated it.  This year we’re following the same “rule”, and I thought I’d show you a quick gift that you can make for children.  Along with our homemade gifts we like to make cards.  Here are a couple that I made this year:

You can also save the fronts of Christmas cards that you receive this year and use them to make cards for next year! I’ll be doing more of that in 2011, that’s for sure!  It’s reusable as well as you’re reducing waste!

Now, on to those simple gifts!  The first one is muffin-cup crayons!  If you have access to some crayons you might have a bunch that are broken into useless pieces making them challenging to use.  I know we have a bunch of these.  So instead of wasting them, I turned them into muffin-cup crayons which make it easier for little ones to hold and become a fun, multi-coloured crayon!  Here are the directions and some pictures:

Muffin-Cup Crayons:

• Gather up all the broken bits of crayons and remove any wrappers around the crayons.
• Sort the crayons into colours or however you want to mix and match them!
• Grease your muffin tin with coconut oil or butter.  Make sure that you do this so that the crayons don’t stick!!!
• Put the crayon bits in the tins in whatever combination you’d like.  I did one cup with reds, yellows and pinks and another with blues, greens and oranges.  But the sky is the limit!
• Put the muffin tin an oven preheated to 300F and remove the tin when the crayons are fully melted.  In my toaster oven this only took 5 minutes.
• Leave the tin on your counter top to cool FULLY.  I left mine for about an hour and a half to be sure.
• Tip the tin over and your crayons should pop right out!

Here is a picture of the crayons right out of the oven:

And here is the finished product:

All you need to do is print off a few colouring pages and put them all in a little baggy for each child!  Simple and fun.