A Quick and Easy Christmas Present

For quite a while, I've been trying to convince Marty to join the middle school youth group at our church. Well, today, while the kids were in Sunday school, I ran into the lady who runs the youth group. She told me that their Christmas party was today and that Marty was welcome to come even though it would be his first meeting. I guess the promise of snacks and a gift exchange was all it took because Marty actually decided to go to the youth group Christmas party.

That just left me the task of coming up with a gift for him to take to the exchange. They could either take a real gift or a gag gift. The kids wouldn't give up any of the things that would qualify as a gag gift and I didn't feel like braving the crazy stores. I went out and raided my box of extra Christmas decorations. Hmmmm...what could I make with this stuff...

The glass Christmas tree (with a removable bottom) was cute but very plain. I got some sleigh bells I had sitting around, some of my ribbon that I use when wrapping presents, and the scissors to curl the ribbon with. I lost track of how many pieces of ribbon I curled but I think it was about 48 pieces (about 12 six to eight inch pieces of red, gold, silver, and green). Once I got it all inside the glass Christmas tree, I cut 2 pieces of pretty wrapping paper to fit inside the plastic bottom. I put the 2 pieces of wrapping paper together so each side of the circle showed pretty paper, placed them in the bottom, and glued the bottom on the tree. This is what the finished product looked like...