Creative Gift Chits
If you haven't finished your Christmas shopping by now, you are either doomed to go to the mall on Christmas eve with the other lazy procrastinators or you are planning to give chits. Sometimes gift chits are unavoidable, such as when the gift is a trip, or the promise to do something nice for someone, or something too big to fit in the house. No matter what they are for, chits are never quite as much as fun as presents you can unwrap, so even if you have a very good reason for giving a chit, you should at least make them fun. Writing what you are giving on the inside of a Christmas card just doesn’t cut it. In this post I will share some of the chits I have made so that you won’t have any excuses for not going to a little extra trouble this year. Most of them don’t take a lot of creativity, so even people like you or my sister Norah should be able to make them.
THE SECRET CODE PUZZLE
I made this gift chit for my son Taylor five years ago and, to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what it promises he will get. If any of you like to do puzzles, perhaps you could unscramble this for me and post the answer in the comments below because I don’t have time to decode it and still get this post out before Christmas.
The coded message made into a puzzle.
This is where people like my friend Cary always say, "How did you DO that? You are SO CLEVER." Cary is easily impressed, but don't you be. There are free sites online that will instantly turn anything you type into code. The Problem Site is a good one. You just type your message in the window, pick the kind of code you want to use and click Encode. Here are some examples of how "Merry Christmas from Youngest Sister" appears in different kinds of code.
Taylor is so smart, I knew he would decode my message in no time, so to make it just a tiny bit harder, I mounted the message on cardboard and cut it into a puzzle. So first he had to put the puzzle together, then he had to decode it. I may not remember what the chit was for, but I still remember Taylor putting the puzzle pieces together and spending a while figuring out what it said. Today Taylor works at Disney Pictures in a geeky job that has something to do with "storage and transcoding" so it is very tempting to give him a chit for something written in Hex or binary, just to see if he can figure it out.
POETRY
When all else fails, write poetry, because expending that amount of effort implies that you aren't just giving a chit because you were too lazy to shop for or ship the gift. My niece Rosalie lives in Richmond, but spends Christmas in California with her family, so I don't like to send anything out there that she is just going to have to haul back to the east coast. Last year my sister Janelle mentioned that the room she stays in at Rosalie's house didn't have a mirror in it, so I bought one and took a picture of it. Then I pulled the picture into Photoshop, wrote a poem about the mirror and plopped it on top of the picture. I printed the picture, put it in a shirt box and wrapped it because, as I said before, chits are never quite as much as fun as presents you can unwrap. Here's the poem: Mirror, mirror on the wall?/Your guestroom hasn't one at all!/The one shown here is plain but true,/And is our Christmas gift to you./So next time Mummy visits your place/She'll be able to look at her face. At the bottom I told her that the mirror was being stored at her Aunt Norah's house and I gave the measurements.
That same year I sent gift certificates to Rosalie and her sister Emily Ann. Sending the gift cards electronically means no one has to worry about losing them, but you don't want the email to arrive before Christmas and spoil the surprise. Plus, you want to give them something they can open ceremoniously so that you can build credit with your sister for having given her kid a good gift (See Breakeven Analysis: Oldest Sister Approval Rating). So I made this chit and, again, wrapped it in a box to make it more fun. When ordering an electronic gift card from most big stores, you can indicate the date you want it sent, so I timed them to arrive after I knew the girls would have opened their presents.
TRIP CHITS
I have made many chits for trips over the years and I really wanted to show you the one where I parodied the Margaret Wise Brown book, Wait Till the Moon is Full, and turned it into Wait Till We Go to New York for Lawler but I'll be damned if I can find it, which is too bad because it was one of my best. But I did find this slighly amusing rebus story I made for Lawler at least ten years ago. The image on the left is the front of the card and the one on the right is the inside. Keep in mind that this was made long before emojis were a thing, and I'm guessing that you can probably make a picture story online with your computer or your phone now. Remember: if I'm thinking of it, it has already been done, but I will leave it for you to figure this one out because I have to get this post out before Christmas and I can't be responsible for teaching you everything.
MONEY GIFTS
If you really have no idea what to give your children or nieces or nephews, I think money is totally acceptable, but my sister Norah disagrees. She thinks giving money is uninteresting and without thought, which puts me in a heck of a spot when I can't think of anything else to give to her daughter, Mary Clark. Mary Clark is a pony cart driver and, if you have ever been on the bill paying end of anything that has anything to do with horses, you know equine sports don't come cheap. There's an old joke, "How do you make a small fortune in the horse business?" And the answer is, "Start with a large fortune." In this respect there is zero difference in ponies and horses, so I suspect Mary Clark appreciates my monetary gifts in spite of her mother's opinion of them. Rather than give Mary Clark money in one of those dreadful money-sized Christmas-themed envelopes, I made a donation envelope for Mary Clark's "Harness Fund." Of course, I invented The Harness Fund and made up all of the cheeky language on the envelope, which is just plain paper printed on both sides, then cut and folded like an envelope.
If you are giving cash, origami is always a good idea, and there are a zillion instructions on the web for how to fold money, origami-style. This is just the top of the first page of a Google image search for origami money:
Yep, that's an origami toilet.
I'm willing to bet I showed you something you had never thought of before and, even though if I'm thinking of it, it has already been done, at least I'm thinking of it, which is more than I can say for people who give a Currier & Ives card with a written explanation of how sorry they are that the real gift isn't there. You might have to read that sentence a couple of times before you understand it. I know I had to. Meanwhile, share your best ideas for creative gift chits below. If you need help, watch this.