Easy and Inexpensive Neighbor Gift Ideas
I love making Christmas neighbor gifts, it’s one of my favorite things to do this time of year. I enjoy coming up with a fun neighbor gift idea and then creating them for all of my friends and neighbors. I end up making a bunch of them each year, so the ideas that I come up with have to be easy and inexpensive. And when I say inexpensive, I mean like $1-2 per gift because I end up making more than 50 each year most years. This year I did an all time high and made more than 100 neighbor gifts. So each year, I really do need to come up with simple and easy ideas. We have lived in our current house for 9 years, so this makes our 10th Christmas season here. I thought it would be fun to share with you all of the neighbor gifts I have made!
I thought it would be fun to start with the first ones that I made and then see how they have evolved. If you notice that there are more than 10 ideas here it’s because I am a crazy person and some years I had different gifts for different families. I will link to the post for each individual post. All of them have detailed tutorials, some include video tutorials. A lot of them also have free printables, to make it easy for you to create these neighbor gifts for your friends and neighbors.
Alright, let’s get started!
2014: This first one is actually one of my favorite ones! I loved it so much that I have done it a couple times, when we lived in another town. It was the very first neighbor gift that we did in our current city. My mom taught me to love practical gifts, and these Christmas soaps are just that!
That year I also made up a fun little printable to attach to a bag a gummy bears, super simple and easy!
2015: This year I made Cookies for Santa plates and along with the plate, I made a up a recipe card and sent the ingredients for them to make the cookies.
2016: This year I made up some fun snowman candy bars to give out. These ones were super easy to make, you just print out the free printables and wrap it around a candy bar. Easy peasy!
That same year, I did something very similar to the candy bars. I made up hot chocolate jars and decorated them to look like snowmen. They were super cute and fun!
Hot Chocolate Mason Jar Snowman
2017: This next neighbor gift idea was a huge hit. I shifted a little bit and instead of doing a gift that involved food, I went with a decor gift. That year I loved making farmhouse signs for my house. I was making them left and right. So it was very fitting that my neighbor gift for that year were these super fun Christmas signs.
This year I also made another version of the cookies for Santa plate. I actually did the cookies for the Santa plate 3 different times because I really like that idea. It’s a fun gift but it’s also a fun activity to do with the kids. This year I added a mason jar filled with the cookie ingredients and decorated it to look like Rudolph.
Cookies for Santa with Rudolph
***Side note and back story***
Funny thing about me is that crafting helps with my sanity and mental health. I started this blog when I had young kids and my original name for my blog was Crafts Keep Me Sane and that was the URL of my blog, before I changed the name to Keeping it Simple. So if you are wondering why in the world I make so many neighbor gifts, this is why. It’s for my mental health, it keeps my depression at bay during the stressful times of the holidays. I tell you all this so you can understand me a little bit more and to explain why I make so many neighbor gifts :).
Alright, back to the neighbor gift ideas!
2018: This year is when I started making more and more neighbor gifts, so I came up with ideas that was super easy so it was easy to make lots of them. The funny thing is that this year I actually made two different neighbor gifts and gave both of them to everyone because I had so much fun making them. Really what happened was that I made up one neighbor gift and then when I was at the store and saw the tiny little Nutella jars and knew I needed to make something with them also!
As I said before, I made two gifts that year. I actually made up these embroidery hoop ornaments first and then found the Nutella jars. These hoops were fun to make and I made up a few designs.
2019: This year was the first year that I decided to make personalized neighbor gifts. These Christmas tea towels are actually my absolute favorite neighbor gift that I have made. They took a little bit of time but I loved how they turned out. It made me happy whenever I finished one. I also made up a few other designs to show that you can make the tea towels without them being personalized.
Apparently that year I was having so fun making things because I also made up these super fun baby Jesus ornaments and gave them to lots of different people.
2020: We all remember this year. 2020 wasn’t a good year for anyone. That year I thought that it would be funny to make up the Christmas soaps again because of the whole COVID thing. Plus since I did it our first year here, there were several families that had never seen it, so I reused the idea.
2021: This year was the first year that I started making neighbor gifts for all my husband’s co-workers in addition to all of our friends and neighbors. Before this year I would just make some gifts for the finance department at his work. This was the year that his company started to grow and we decided that I should make one for everyone in his office. I loved the idea of giving personalized gifts so this year I found some cheap mugs and personalized them.
Monogram Mug with Hot Chocolate
2022: This year I went back to the cookies for Santa plates because that was another gift that I did back when we didn’t know many people. But this time I did a simplified version of it because I made more than 75 of them. I found these awesome plates at the Dollar Tree and I added vinyl to them. I went to 4 different Dollar Trees to get all of the plates that I needed :).
Personalized Cookies for Santa Plate
2023: Now we are to this year! This year I started working full time, so the amount of time that I had to make neighbor gifts went down drastically. I had to come up with a simple and easy neighbor gift idea so that I could make. The past few years I have done the personalized gifts and I have loved doing it. It takes a little extra time but not much and I feel like it really adds to the gift, so I went with that again this year. Since I didn’t have as much time this year as the past years, I made up something to make with all the supplies that I had in my craft room, no going around all over town to find things. I didn’t have time for that. So I made up these fun wooden Christmas ornaments. Because these were really easy to make, I ended up making more than 100 of them! By far the most neighbor gifts that I have ever made.
Do you make neighbor gifts for Christmas each year? I have loved making these through out the years. It’s my way of telling my friends that I love them and I’m grateful that they are in my life.
I would love to know which one is neighbor gift is your favorite.
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