I find it harder and harder to decide on what to gift the family for Christmas. I mean, I'm reluctant to gifting our daughter another batch of toys that dissappear in a box without looking at it for another long period of time. And I'm definitely not keen on adding much plastic to the toy collection, I rather focus on things that are useful and unlock some creative flows instead.
But when you have tons of craft supplies and a box filled with all sorts of pain, on top of that watercolour pencils and tons of markers of all kinds, at some point you can say it's smarter to buy creative supplies at the moment you need them rather than adding more.
Every year, I get to be Santa's (my boyfriend, lol) Elf and am in charge of the gift department. My boyfriend is way over his head in work and on top of that he will forget whatever gifts are already bought while adding new ones. It's just best that I take care of this part.
Every year we have a ritual that we sit down on Christmas eve together and wrap the final gifts (usually there are a few left) and start writing the names and add some ribbon for decoration. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the packages this year, besides one that includes family pictures so I'm not publishing that one here. I will share the gift with you that my daughter loved most:
As I mentioned before I started a little business, these are a few examples of what I'm selling, and I knew when I ordered the goods that I was going to keep aside some of the charms and bracelet for our daughter. She wears it every day, which is cute.
It's always harder to decide on gifts for us two. One of these gifts was decided easily because my boyfriend wanted a silver necklace so he got one of these. For myself I was happy to find these two adult colouring books maybe two months ago while shopping for other stuff:
Someone had two cool trousers for sale and offered bundle discounts from 3 items up, I saw these two books and received 50% discount on the total order, eventually the books cost me 2,50 euros each! They are brandnew, 80 pages and very thick paper. A steal!
It's always a surprise with these things if the quality is indeed very good, and of course how many pages are really cool to colour? Well here are a few examples:
I found even cooler ones after taking the pictures, so I'm really happy with them. In total 160 colouring pages to get a zen mindset. I plan on doing some colouring every day from now on. Maybe I can fill them completely by Christmas 2025...
At first, I only used markers as I have so many, I figured there will be plenty of them really nice to use in this book. Below you can see me using one page as test page and finding out that only one type of marker bled through the paper:
On the top right pictures you can see the coloured part on the left (the brownish/goldish) part, that's all that bled through, I noticed it's an alcohol based marker afterwards. The bottom left picture is what's on the back of the page, I tried covering it up but not with great success. Oh well, I wil have more of these markers that will bleed through, I'm just a bit sad for using this as my test page because I kind of like that one.
On the right bottom you can see the first attempt using the new pencils I brought from the Action store yesterday. They colour really nice, I yet have to find the colouring flow though, but I'm happy with the pencils.
I think this was the best gift I received, even though I fixed it myself, I still had to wait until Christmas to receive it, lol.
Whenever my Secret Santa gift arrives from one of the Silver Gold Stackers community members, it's possible that I like the shiny gift more, but that's ok. They are both a different category of gits, lol.
I hope you enjoyed your gift unpacking this year, what was your favourite gift?
All pictures above are my own.
