Saving Money With Homemade Gift Baskets

Homemade gift basket
One of my cousins hosted a house warming party over the weekend. Despite being two years after her move, none of the cousins had visited her (and her boyfriend's) new townhome.

One of the things wifey and I debated was an appropriate house warming gift.

As we weren't sure how much space or what appliances they had, we didn't want to buy something they couldn't use.

After weeks of perusing flyers, we decided it would be best if we made our own gift basket.

Wifey was skeptical at first. She wasn't sure how it would turn out. Plus she didn't want to seem like we were being cheap. As you can see in the picture, it turned out fairly well. Wifey was surprised and felt really good with our gift basket.

So what did we put in the gift basket?

First, we bought a basket. Nothing too fancy, but one that felt sturdy enough for our purpose of carrying a lot of stuff. That was $5.
Next, we purchased some cutlery. That was the first thing to go into the basket. We figured everyone needed cutlery. $35.

Then, we purchased a bottle of wine from the LCBO. We picked a "summer"-y looking white wine with a rainbowed sea horse on the label. $12.

Next we picked up some snacks and threw that in the basket as well. $2.

For the other drinks, I put in a bottle of sparkling water, some fruity flavoured water, and some cans of iced tea. $3.

We figured since it was a party, we could bring some snacks and beverages.

In total, we spent around $60 (I rounded up). Which isn't bad. It's hard to do comparables, but browsing online for gift baskets, the prices can range from $50 to $150. Smaller baskets can be had for less than $50, but generally, those baskets are food only. Things like cookies, popcorn, some fancy pastry I cannot pronounce, etc.

When wifey and I moved into the house, our real estate gave us a gift basket as well. I believe the value of the gift basket was in the neighbourhood of $100. We received was some stationary, some snacks, a bottle of wine, and the basket.

We haven't used the stationary. We couldn't as the address on some of the pages contained an incorrect postal code*. The snacks were good, but very sweet. As a result, we gave most of it away. The bottle of wine, we let my mother-in-law drink.

Don't get me wrong, the gift basket was nice and appreciated. But thinking that the cost of this basket was likely in the $100 range made me wonder if it truly was worth this much.

Regardless, we showed up to my cousin's house and gifted her the basket. She was very happy with the basket and said that it was too much.

I guess she thought we spent a lot of money on it.

This made wifey feel very happy.


*Seems the postal code from the Google search of our address differs from the Canada Post search of our address. Guess which search people use more often?

Comments

  1. I think home-made gifts are way better than store purchased ones. We made a gift basket for my parents this past Christmas and it was great.

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