Ten Do-It-Yourself Gift Books for the Holidays

Fa la la la Felt: 45 Handmade Holiday Decorations
Christmas retro never looked so adorable. The adorable felt ornaments in this book would be fun for children and adults just learning to sew by hand. Practiced artisans could probably turn out a treeful in no time at all.

100 Easy Recipes in Jars
Do you need gifts for all of your kid's teachers, or the folks at your favorite non-profit group? This book can help with easy-to-make recipes for "gifts in a jar" such as spicy nuts, soup mixes with beans, popcorn spice, and cookie mix. Includes tips for decorating. And the best part is, these presents have an almost unlimited shelf-life so you can make them in advance.

FamilyFun Homemade Holidays: 150 Festive Crafts, Recipes, Gifts & Parties
Something for every winter holiday - Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa - therefore a good book for teachers, scout leaders, etc. So get out the glue gun and the glitter, by golly!

Country Living Deck the Halls: Christmas Notecards, Labels, Ornaments, and Other Festive Fun Projects
This book offers a chance "to turn inexpensive and overlooked materials into scene-stealing stars." Whimsical gift ideas include recycling old sweaters, handkerchiefs and brooches for new uses. The book even includes templates for Family Gift I.O.U.s and clip art for packages and letters. Lots of inspiration!

Simple Gifts: 50 Little Luxuries to Craft, Sew, Cook Knit
It's not often that a book about homemade gifts is described as "hip" by so many reviewers, so this must be a rare gem. From candy caramels to candles, this book is great for the modern experience of giving.

 Holiday Recipes
This is a basic Christmas cookbook, and thus would make a nice gift in itself especially for a new bride or young adult who has just flown the nest. You can learn to bake holiday bread for the office party, make jello-salad or teriyaki wings for the family on Christmas Eve, and brew a cup of spice tea for yourself to enjoy while curled up by the fire. Or bake a batch of cookies for Santa Claus.

I'm Dreaming of a Green Christmas: Gifts, Decorations, and Recipes that Use Less and Mean More
If you love wreaths made with pine cones and garlands of fragrant greenery, this book is for you. Easy earth-friendly crafts and recipes mingle with notes on green traditions around the world. And the author includes an extensive list of green organizations and resources to inspire you around the year.

Gooseberry Patch Christmas Book 13: Recipes, Projects, and Gift Ideas
This year's offering from the Gooseberry Patch series - Lucky 13 - continues the jolly tradition of recipes and gifts with excellent instructions.

Gooseberry Patch: Christmas All Through the House: Over 600 Holiday Recipes, Cheery Crafts and Easy-to-Make Gifts for Flurries of Fun!

And if you haven't been collecting the Gooseberry series for years, here's an all-in-one compilation of Christmas instructions, recipes, and decorating idea from Christmas past.

Priceless Christmas: Create a Joyous Holiday for Next to Nothing (Priceless Holidays)
Since so many families are still coping with economic hard times this Christmas, the word "Priceless" in the title has a powerful double-meaning. The joy is in the act of spending time with family, creating and giving. As the Grinch learned the hard way - "maybe Christmas itself doesn't come from a store, maybe Christmas means just a little bit more." That's why it's awesome that the author includes instructions for a "Whoville Party" your little ones will enjoy!

Shirley Jackson: Life Among the Savages

One of my favorite books while growing up was Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, a chronicle of an unusual mother raising four boisterous children in a decrepit house in rural Vermont. Since the book is so humorous, I didn't realize that the author also wrote horror stories until I was in high school and read "The Lottery," which is Jackson's most famous story about a small town that turns against someone in a brutal and shocking way.

 According to the Bennington, Vermont, Village Website:

On a bright spring morning in 1948, she walked down the Prospect hill with a baby stroller for a round of village errands. An hour or so later, Shirley Jackson pushed the stroller up the hill with newspapers, the mail, groceries -- and a story in mind. Once home, she set her toddler into the playpen and wrote "The Lottery" in less than two hours. It was posted to her agent that evening, and published in The New Yorker three weeks later (June 28, 1948).
The story created an immediate uproar. "The Lottery" describes a communal rite in a tidy Yankee village quite like the author's own. As generations of readers were shocked to learn, community order in the fictional village is nourished by solstice blood. The New Yorker's inbox was filled with complaints and subscription cancellations. Shirley Jackson became a national sensation.

Jackson is also known for her creepy novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle, so it probably comes as a surprise to some readers that she had a very domesticated life as an eccentric stay-at-home mother married to a snarky college professor.


In Life Among the Savages, and again in the sequel, Raising Demons, the voice is not that of the perfect mother stereotype of the 50s and 60s - her children and critics alike agree on that point. According to her biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, which I highly recommend, Shirley drank every afternoon, often lost track of just where her children were, and was surely not the world's best housekeeper - but then she never claimed to be. In some ways she reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men, classically educated and intelligent, leaning towards plump after childbearing, definitely living in the over-sized gothic house. But unlike the rather shallow and perfectly coiffed Betty, as well as the Donna Reeds and Mary Tyler Moores depicted on TV at that time as motherly stereotypes, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only woman at that time in Bennington Vermont who also had a job that paid money. She was a writer. And she was a famous writer of unusual talent - the Stephen King of her day. Yes she made tuna casserole, sorted socks and cleaned out drawers, but then she would sit down at a typewriter, light a cigarette, and write amazing stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's.


Pages from Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
About one thing there's no doubt: Shirley Jackson enjoyed the hell out of being a mother, and she was rather ahead of her time in writing down exactly what her children were saying and doing, no matter how odd or unnerving that was. She wasn't afraid of being honest, so her dialogue is timeless, and that makes these stories of family life refreshing even today.

...Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.

...There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.

...From the girl's room, small voices rose in song and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was to hear a brother and two sisters playing affectionately together; then, suddenly, the words of the song penetrated into my hot mind, and I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. "Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider," was what they were singing.

...Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting "O-U-T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea, with a dirty dishrag turned inside out" . . .