1. Print a Family Photo Book
What better way to remember the year than with the gift of a beautiful photo book? Blurb
and Lulucan take your photos and turn them into gorgeous books that your family will cherish. This is an especially great way to remember a major event, like a wedding or the birth of a child, and is 100 percent grandparent approved.
2. Jazz Up Homemade Candy
For the last couple of years, around the holidays I have made my family and friends fudge. This year, I’m thinking of stepping it up a notch by making a few different types of candy. It’s a delicious and cost effective way to spread some holiday cheer.
AllRecipes has a great collection of candy recipes to get you started, and you can kick your packaging up a notch with an assist from My Own Labels, which can print customized labels and packaging for just about anything.
3. Personalize a Jelly Bean Mix
Who doesn’t love jelly beans? They taste great and they’re loaded with sugar, the two criteria necessary for a holiday treat. The folks at Jelly Belly will let you customize your own mix of jelly beans on the MyJellyBelly site. You get to choose which flavors of jelly beans make the mix, which size and shape tin to use to package them up, and customize the packaging with your own text and photos (or clipart that they provide, your call).
4. Create a Cookbook
Know any aspiring chefs? Tastebook has you covered. The innovative site helps anyone create their own gourmet cookbook by choosing recipes from magazines, Web sites and cookbooks from places like Epicurious, Food Network, Gourmet, and Better Homes & Gardens.
You can augment the recipes from the pros with your own recipes and photos, and then Tastebook will print the whole thing in a beautifully made binder with a custom cover.
5. Remix a Shirt
Even if you’re not an artist, Spreadshirt lets you remix t-shirt designs others have created with your own images and text. That way, you can still claim to have made the gift, even if someone else did the heavy lifting.
If you do have some artistic chops, however, you won’t need to use semantic loopholes to make your family and friends awesome gifts. Check out Zazzle and CafePress, which both offer an amazing array of print-on-demand products that you can customize with your own design. Everything from skateboards to shoes to mugs to custom-skinned Flip video cameras.
6. Develop Your Own Energy Bar or Shake
Quick: Name something that’s better for refueling during a workout than a store-bought energy bar. The correct answer is: an energy bar you design yourself. YouBar is a great custom food service that lets you design and produce your very own energy bars, shakes, cookies, chocolates or trail mix.
You get to pick out all the ingredients, such as nuts, dried berries, vitamin infusions and sweeteners, and then name your creation — the name goes on the custom packaging that each item comes in. One of the best features of YouBar is that the site automatically updates nutrition facts for what you’re creating as you’re building it.
7. Make a Calendar of Your Photos
If you went on a fun vacation in 2009, a calendar might be the perfect way to remember all those memories throughout 2010. Calendars are great, very timely gifts for the holidays, and a calendar of photos you shot is even more meaningful. Luckily, Flickr makes it dead simple to create a calendar of your photos.
Simply log in, choose the photos you want to include, and click the “Print a Calendar” button. Flickr can also print cards, photo books, and collages from your pictures.
8. Make Your Own Lego Set
When I was a kid, I loved building stuff out of LEGO blocks, and the LEGO DesignByMe site offers a killer way to spread the LEGO love to your favorite niece or nephew. Once you download the free LEGO Digital Designer software (PC/Mac), you’ll have the tools necessary to create your own LEGO designs, which can be professionally manufactured and boxed up (you can design your own box too), ready to give as gifts.
What will you make? A dragon? An airplane? Maybe even a LEGO Twitter bird. It’s up to you; the sky’s the limit.
9. Print a Batch of Custom M&Ms
Chocolate center. Hard candy shell. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands. I can only be talking about M&Ms, one of my favorite candies of all time. And now, thanks to My M&Ms you can give the gift of personalized chocolate candies.
The My M&Ms site lets you put anything — from a photo to a logo to a little bit of text — on M&Ms. You can choose which colors to print on (from way more choices than you can buy at the local convenience store), and your packaging, then order your own one-of-a-kind creations.
10. Create Your Own Brand of Cereal
There’s a lot of food on this list, but I’ve saved one of the best for last: cereal. [me]&goji,MixMyGranola, and MojaMix will each let you mix your own customized cereal or granola mixes, but only [me]&goji will allow you to add a photo to the box to further personalize your gift. Who wouldn’t want to wake up on Christmas morning to a bowl of customized cereal they got as a gift?
ที่มา: http://mashable.com/2009/12/02/unique-gift-guide/
