Christmas IS my favorite time of year. 

Today I'm joining Tonya with her Handmade Holidays 2011 and Abbi with her Handmade Christmas Carnival. 

- What can I say, I love Christmas!

As a child Christmas was always magical - and no matter how little money my parents had, they always managed to make my gifts special, and usually just what I wanted, but didn't know it! I love preparing for, and celebrating Christmas! That being said:

There are only 75 days until Christmas. 

For the normal American consumer, it's not Black Friday yet, and so, it's not time to think of Christmas. For our family - we have to start thinking way ahead of time in order to "pull off" Christmas. Both because of working costs into our budget (we do not charge gifts on credit cards), but also because we made a "vow" a few years ago to do as many handmade Christmas gifts as possible.

I've started a little pile of Christmas in my closet. :) 

We are ordering a few things for the boys online, because we just can't make everything that we have on our list for them. One of these things was a set of wooden eating utensils. We have pretty much rid our house of plastics, and have been making do, or slowly replacing some things with more high quality goods. One of the things we wanted to do was to get the boys some wooden kitchen things for themselves.   

We got these sets at Hip Mountain Mama.

Another thing we wanted for the boys were element stackers - which if ordered from one of the many toy companies online, would send our budget screaming away - and to make on our own would have been a little expensive and time consuming just for little stackers.... So, we found an alternative! 

Cedar already got the fire stacker for Autumn Equinox - and so each boy will get another for Christmas. I found these unfinished (not even sanded) here, sanded them, stained them with water color paints, and sealed them with food safe wood sealer. :) 1/2 made by me! I like them. 

I also have a few knitted items done, and ready to go. 

And a bunch of our Chokecherry jam made all festive, and ready to hand out. 

I usually like to wrap presents as I finish them up - then I don't have presents sitting around for the wrong people to see, and I don't have a stack of gifts to wrap at once. 

This year Thorin helped me make wrapping paper from packing paper that was in packages we received throughout the year in the mail. I just saved it for wrapping paper, and we used some festive cookie cutters dipped in paint as stamps. 

I am making really simple tags this year too - I got a circuit for Christmas a few years ago (I really do use it a lot) and have a cartridge with letters and tags on it. So I just cut them out - the letters are pages from a book that I'm recycling (it was beyond repair). 

It may look like I have a lot done already - but in reality I've only just scrapped the surface. We have large extended families that also exchange gifts - and some bigger wooden projects planned for the boy's gifts. 

You'll just have to keep coming back to see what else we have for Christmas!!