Christmas Hampers – How to Make a Personalised Gift Hamper

Many stores have an extensive selection of Christmas hampers and will gladly charge and arrange for delivery in time for Christmas. All you need to do is pick out items that you would like to include in the hamper and the store does the rest. Pre-packed Christmas hampers are also widely available and delicatessens’ will often provide hampers with produce of the country of your choice.

Make Your Own Christmas Hamper

How about putting together your own Christmas hamper as a gift? It needn’t be expensive or time consuming and with some imagination, you can create the perfect, personalised gift hamper.

Personalised Gift Hampers

Keep the person in mind who you are buying for – remember their interests and tastes (not necessarily yours!).  Choose your hamper theme, set a budget and begin your hunt for items for the hamper. Remember, if you sending the hamper by Royal Mail, the cost of postage may affect your budget, so from a cost and breakage perspective, avoid including heavy glass items in your hamper (with perhaps the exception of a small bottle of home made sloe gin). If you are personally handing it on, fill it to the brim – but make sure the person receiving the hamper is able to carry it home.

What to Put in a Home Made Hamper

Once you have a theme for your hamper, draw up a list of what you would like to include.

Aim to include something fun, beautiful and useful in your gift selection.

Here are two ideas for making personalised gift hampers to get you thinking:

Alternative Gift Hampers

Remember – a hamper can be created to suit all tastes – and that doesn’t necessarily mean food and drink just because it’s a Christmas gift!

Not everyone wants to indulge at Christmas – you can create a healthy christmas hamper and include some of the following ideas:

• detox tea
• luxury cereal bars
• Health Food shop voucher
• selection of vitamins
• a skipping rope
• box of low fat cereal
• a tape measure
• bathroom scales
• bottles of energy drink

Eco Gift Hamper

Wrap gifts in newspaper for an alternative look and aim to buy your purchases from second hand or charity shops – don’t forget charity gifts are another unusal gift idea. Look out for books on waste management and recycling or ideas for allotment gardening; buy energy lighting bulbs, battery rechargers, can crushers, or soap savers. Your thrift will be appreciated!

With a little imagination, you will be giving the perfect, personalised gift by making Christmas Hamper.

Pakistan Flood Appeal

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by the worst flooding to hit the country.

Disease is the new threat after more than a million people hit by monsoon deluges in northwest of Pakistan.

The huge scale of damage from the Pakistan floods caused by a week of heavy monsoons is still being assessed, but officials say over a thousand are dead and tens of thousands more are stranded with a further two million affected in North West Pakistan.

Pakistan flood news video

Oxfam in Pakistan

Oxfam has been working with communities in Pakistan since the 1970′s and has supported more than forty emergency projects in the last 20 years. To assist the displaced people of the Swat Valley, Oxfam is working with trusted local partners to support those in most urgent need of assistance in the main camps and in communities.

Oxfam has begun an emergency aid effort for the victims of the worst flood in Pakistan for 35 years.

Donate to the Pakistan flood appeal

Worst flood in Pakistan for 35 years

Rescuers, aided by the military, are battling to bring supplies to people trapped in remote areas, while camps have been set up for those whose homes and businesses have been washed away or submerged by the floodwaters.

A westerly weather system sweeping in over Iran and Afgahnistan and the regional monsoon season combined to cause the worst downpour ever recorded in Pakistan.

The northwest of the country was hit hardest, with more than a million people affected by flash floods and mudslides.

Hundreds of people have drowned in the Peshawar valley, which includes the districts of Nowshera and Charsadda, and many others are still missing, according to a disaster management official.

More than 400 people were also killed by heavy flooding in the districts of Swat and Shangla.

Latifur Rehman, spokesman for the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, said: “Aerial monitoring is being conducted, and it has shown that whole villages have washed away, animals have drowned and grain storages have washed away.”

Officials warned that the death toll from the flooding could go even higher as rescue workers have been unable to access certain areas because of the severe floods.

There is the added risk of the water-borne diseases, such as cholera, spreading in the flooded communities.

More than 30,000 Pakistani army troops have rescued more than 19,000 people from the marooned areas but officials conceded some might still be trapped and awaiting help in remote areas including Kohistan, Nowshera, Dir and in the Swat valley.

Major-General Athar Abbas, an army spokesman, said: “The level of devastation is so widespread, so large, it is quite possible that in many areas there are damages, there are deaths which may not have been reported.”

Abbas added: “Virtually no bridge has been left in Swat. All major and minor bridges have gone, destroyed completely by the floods.”

The US embassy in Islamabad said it was assisting with the rescue efforts and pledged more than $10 million in immediate humanitarian aid.

Wine Tasting Notes

Wine snobs get right up my nose but unfortunately “nose” has been previously spoke of by whine snobs.

Wine snobs are no fun, but neither are knuckle draggers who insist on complete wine ignorance.

Amateurs often end up tongue-tied, but I find many experts wind up being overly eloquent and/or exact about the wines they taste. Consider this excerpt description of a Chateauneuf du Pape wine that I received in a mailing from an online wine store:

“… this prodigious effort boasts an inky/blue/purple color to the rim in addition to an exceptional bouquet of camphor, roasted meats, blueberries, black cherries, black currants, truffles, beef blood, pepper, and incense….”

Solution for this non-existent dilemma of descibing wine (for some people):

Non Pretentious Wine Tasting

Be non-pretentious and simply state whether it smells good or not, tastes good or not, & if it reminds you of a certain flower or fruit. No need for verbosity or pompousness.

This works for me every time & if I am asked to nit-pick it even more I tell them I don’t care about the details. If I sit next to a wine snob who won’t stop talking, I tell them beer tastes better than wine any day….that will surely shut them up.

In an article in the Times recently a reader commented that during an Etihad flight to Australia they sat with a viticulturist who made the following observation following a trip to France and Italy.

The space on the back of a wine bottle is valuable real estate. Most european wineries ignore it or put drivel there.

The few wineries that have amusing or useful information help sway a sale (at least for me).