Color Yourself Happy This Holiday Season

Have you started your Christmas shopping, or are you wondering how you will manage to stretch your dollars during this inflationary period? Here are ideas to help you Color Everyone Happy this Season.

Included in this post

• Template and Recipe for a Gingerbread House
• 7 Things to make and give

It is Gift Giving Season again. You can do so many things to create a Christmas Miracle of your own. After all, most of us are tired of the Pandemic holidays where we found it necessary to stay at home and forgo our family festivities and traditions. But now, we are curtailed by high inflation. Thankfully we can focus on old-fashioned values and ideas.

I’m sure you remember Christmases from your childhood when your parents were undergoing lean times. Somehow, they pulled something off each year. My mother was good at it. I could always wake up on Christmas morning to stockings stuffed with oranges, walnuts, and perhaps a small toy. During lean times of my own, when I was responsible for giving my family the experience of a good Christmas, it caused a lot of concern early in the season. Somehow, each year would bring an unexpected Christmas Miracle, which taught me to have faith.

Christmas is having a wonderful meal with family around the table and many laughs. Then sauntering off, tummy full, to read a good book. Right after, everyone helps with the dishes!

Here is a Gingerbread House You Can Make With Your Whole Family

This recipe is originally gluten-free and is one of the recipes contained in my cookbook, Gluten-Free, You Can Do It! Use regular white flour for a non-gluten-free version of your Gingerbread Recipe.

Here are 7 Gift Ideas —Priceless because you make them!

Now let’s see, many gifts you make yourself are not entirely free, but with a few inexpensive purchases, you can make yourself and someone else happy! There is no pleasure more than making someone something with your own hands.

1. Pretty cups and saucers bought at a thrift shop to benefit a local charity. Fill with chocolates and candies. Wrap with a clear cellophane wrap and tie with a pretty ribbon.
2. Find some rocks and paint them as paperweights. Sign and date. Attach a card with loving wishes inside.
3. Mason Jar filled with your favorite fast soup mix, with recipe and instructions for cooking attached. See the recipe below.
4. Write a Poem and print it on colorful paper. Use pencil crayons to draw pictures on an envelope to hold the poem.
5. Knit some slippers – or go to a Seniors Center where they sell knit items.
6. Make a picture book of happy memories you have shared. Write a list of how much you love the recipient.
7. Search your closets for something old and precious. Write a story about it. Wrap it and place it under the tree.

You can make a Dried Gluten-Free Soup Mix recipe and put it in Mason Jars.

• Freeze Dried Vegetables (1 cup per quart jar)
• Chicken Bouillon (2 tsp. per quart jar)
• Corn Starch (1/3 cup per quart jar)
• Onion Soup Mix (1 tbsp. per quart jar)
• Directions: Blend all together depending on the number of Mason or Ball Jars you intend to fill. Pour the dry mix into jars and close the lids. Tie a recipe ingredient list with how-to-make instructions. Add 1/4 cup of mix to 2 1/2 cups of cold water for two generous mugs of soup. Stir and heat to a boil. Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

The Meaning of Gifts is measured through the heart of the Giver!

Some years the gifts were all homemade! But many a Christmas Miracle brought the store-bought kind too. The holidays bring out the best and worst of us. For some, it is a psychological time bomb that draws from our innermost being the fortitude to do something happy. I feel for those whose Christmas has been muted because of the passing of a loved one or other circumstances beyond their control. We have all been there to one degree or another. I remember my own life and sharing Christmases past with friends and family. The unexpected, heartfelt gifts we receive are most meaningful and remembered always.

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