Personalize the season with gifts from the heart

By Helyn Trickey
Special to CNN

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CNN -- It seems to start earlier each year: Garland, lights and Christmas trees appear as early as October in some shop windows and malls; holiday music - a siren's call to consumers - floats through department stores and weaves around clothes racks and jewelry cases in November.

But some would-be shoppers avoid the crowded parking lots, long checkout lines and hefty price tags in favor of homemade, personal gifts that can't be found in any sale bin at Target or specialty rack in Macy's.

"I started feeling like I had to buy things for people just to buy something because it was Christmas, and I started opening presents and saying thank you. But I didn't feel like I really needed or wanted any of it," said Serena Bishop of Bend, Oregon.

Bishop, who gave up a thriving career in the corporate world to spend time hiking and camping in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii, found herself at a loss last year when it came time to shower holiday gifts on family and friends. She was keeping a close eye on her budget and wasn't anywhere close to a mall.

Finally, it dawned on her.

She looked around Opal Creek, the snow-glazed old growth forest where she and several friends were wintering, and saw the perfect gift all around her.

Hand-made holiday

"Last Christmas I felt like I was in such a beautiful place, and I wanted to share that with everyone. I just took pictures of the woods I was in and made Christmas cards and sewed cloth bags for wrapping," Bishop said.

"I think the biggest thing was that no one in my family had been in Opal Creek," she said. "In some way I was able to give them an understanding of why I loved this place so much."

Bishop isn't alone in her scaled-down, personal vision of gift-giving, according to Peter Francese, a demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather in New York.

"(There is a) trend among a certain psychographic type of people -- the arts and crafts crowd. People who knit and make jam, these people want to be doing something in their free time. It's part of who they are and who they've always been -- they like to make something, they like creation," Francese said.

Francese estimates that nearly 20 million adults - roughly 10 percent of the adult population - may fall into this group which tends to value the personalization and creativity that comes from making homemade jam, knitting a pair of socks or crafting a piece of jewelry.

Gift ideas challenge holiday traditions

For Cornelia Coleman, a graduate student in Portland, Oregon, announcing that she was giving up on the gift-giving rat race was met with a big sigh of relief from most of her extended family.

"One year I announced at Thanksgiving that I wouldn't be doing presents that year, but would bake special treats to make Christmas extra festive," she said. "This was greeted with huge relief from all the grownups, who thought it was a great idea. They'd all felt the same way, but no one had wanted to say anything for fear of being thought a Scrooge," she said. "Predictably, the most resistance came from the kids. The tradeoff for them is that they get treated with extra care on their birthdays, so they have become reconciled to the situation."

Instead, Coleman celebrates the holiday season with butter, flour, sugar and a lots of holiday music. Last year she made a fruitcake, two kinds of cookies, homemade almond brittle and cranberry-pistachio biscotti.

"It's far more satisfying to spend the time in the kitchen baking the goodies and listening to Christmas music than circling a parking lot looking for a spot and standing in line in overheated stores," she said.

Dawn Jongko -- artist, wife, and full-time mother of five children who is expecting her sixth this spring - challenges her family to think creatively to make holiday gifts.

"There's just so much you can make for people if you really focus on their needs or what will make them happy. It can be the simplest thing," she said.

For instance, for Christmas not long after his parents' Gulf Coast home had been damaged by hurricane Ivan in 2004, Jongko's husband, Richard, scoured the barren property for a piece of wood that he could use to carve a nameplate for their new home in Alabama.

A question of time

While homemade gifts may be less costly than a PlayStation 3 or a cashmere throw, the time spent planning and making these gifts can be formidable.

"The vast majority of Americans do not have time for this, even if they wanted to make something with their own hands," Francese said.

Coleman throws herself into baking goodies for her family's holiday party early.

"I'll start my prep after I finish my last final exam (in early December)," she said.

"The first part involves a lot of list-making, as I have to go through recipes and figure out what I need. Then I'll hit (the grocery store) for supplies," she said. "I usually don't have to go to specialty stores, although last year I had a hard time finding ingredients for the fruitcake. Also, there is a little recipe research involved, as I try to do one new thing every year."

This year Bishop plans to delight her family and friends with large prints of photographs she took on a hiking trip along the Nepali Coast in Hawaii.

"I have a couple of ideas for frames," she said. "I don't just want to go to the frame store. I'd like to make a frame out of card stock and then use buttons or small, smooth stones and make a frame. Or maybe I'll do something with bamboo."

Whatever idea she settles on, Bishop believes that the time she might spend gathering rocks or sorting through buttons is all worth it.

"As soon as I decided I wasn't going to spend (a certain) amount of money on each person, it made me feel so less pressured," she said. "I stopped taking stock about what I got from others after I stopped giving so much stuff to other people."

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