Homemade gifts and mutually beneficial presents

With Christmas and the holiday period comes an excuse to spend more time creating and everyone benefits.

Crispin the Crab - now ready for adventure..

Whatever we make, the act of creating is for most of us surely most satisfying when we have someone else that appreciates our efforts.

We exchanged more home-made presents within the extended Grant family this year than ever before. Cake, drink, a house sign, racks for spices and medals, calendars, photographs, a paintbrush holder and even a portrait. But if we awarded prizes, the one for the most original would go to Jenny’s niece Evie who made Crispin the Crab a life jacket.

That’s lovely but…

During the first few years of our marriage the phrase “that’s lovely…. But do you have the receipt?” was quite common. Fortunately giving presents to each other has become a lot less stressful since Jenny and I discovered the power of the “mutually beneficial” present.

A mutually beneficial present is one that both the person giving, and the person receiving, will benefit from. I thoroughly recommend this approach if you too struggle at times to find the right present for someone you are close to and spend time with.

First of all, at least one of you will always be happy. We’ve found that by giving presents that we ourselves want, we can be sure that at least one of us is always delighted by the gift. Over the years our art collection has grown and we’ve a fine collection of kitchen equipment, some of which we even still use. This year I received from Jenny a mini Roberts radio. It punches well above its size in sound and price and I’m told it connects easily to Bluetooth. I’ve been enjoying the distant sound of Pavarotti as Jenny rediscovers her love of opera. I’m looking forward to trying it out myself at some point.

Small, but sounds punchy

Secondly, for woodworkers, or other fellow creators, you now have the excuse you need to spend more time in the months before Christmas doing what you love. The pleasure that comes from many hobbies is being able to spend time doing something that is neither important nor needed. For most of us though, it can be hard to justify spending a lot of time doing something that is, by definition, pointless.

But that all changes if what you are making can be given as a present that has some potential purpose in the home. No longer do we need to worry about the answer to the question “now what should I do with this thing I’ve just made”. Every project has its place. Wrap it up and gift it. Even if that place is sometimes hidden behind the sofa.

The Robert’s radio wasn’t the only mutually beneficial present this year. Cooking has also now become part of my creative journey. We like curries and spicy food in our family and we have accumulated a lot of jars of spices, but until a couple of days ago, no spice rack. If I’m going to cook more, I don’t want to be wasting what would otherwise be woodworking time scrabbling around in the cupboard trying to find the spices I need.

So I nipped into our local timber merchants before they shut for Christmas and picked up a couple of lengths of oak strip, 3 metres long and slightly wider than a spice jar. Once home, there was not a lot to do other than cut to length and pass a couple of pieces through the bandsaw, glue up with Titebond and trim the edges down with a No 4 Stanley plane. A few hours and a couple of days later I had assembled the spice rack, varnished, wrapped and ready for Jenny’s Christmas present.

Alphabetical order, of course.

Making that spice rack was a reminder of how hard it is to make a living as a professional woodworker. The materials alone cost around £30 (about $40). Spice racks sell for less than that online.

Josiah Stinson of the Crooked School Workshop, wrote recently on Substack about woodworkers who cook….

“When I get together with other woodworkers, talk of food and cooking often come up and many of them are like us, the cooks in the household”.

I can’t claim to be “the” cook in our house, but this got me thinking. In my experience, there are two types of cooks. The type who feel the need to wash up and clean as they go along and the type who seem oblivious to the dirty dishes and vegetable peelings accumulating around them. I’m fairly confident I know which category most woodworker chefs fall into.

The spice rack was another successful mutually beneficial present. But of course, not every gift is better for being homemade. Jenny’s father Rod has many talents and is a frequent visitor. The case of French wine he gave us this year will most definitely be benefitting us all mutually for some time to come.