Eight Days of Hanukkah

Hanukkah this year officially begins at sundown on Friday, December 11. Eight days of gifting? Sounds like fun to me!

Here are three creative ways to approach this opportunity for serial gifting (good stuff even if you do not celebrate this holiday):

1. A charm bracelet (Pandora and Trollbeads are popular...or old-fashioned charms are cute on a necklace...). Give the bare chain first, followed by one charm a day. See if you can attach a story or some meaning to each charm.

2. The old gift box-within-a-gift box, times eight. Big box on the outside, with seven progressively smaller giftwrapped boxes nested within. Have a small gift attached to the outside of each box, with a special goody inside the final one.

3. Figure-out-the-gift build-a-sentence word-a-day clue builder (with gratitude to my dad for this wonderful idea): Each day, the giftees (most likely, your kids) get a card with a jumbled up word -- their job is to decipher the word. At the end of the week, they will have seven words, which they will then need to arrange to create a sentence. For example, the sentence might be: "Let's take a special trip this summer." On the eighth day, the gift giver presents a final jumbled word or finds a clever way to present the final clue (in this hypothetical case, your destination). When my dad did this, he feigned ambivalence at the end and said "let's just go in the dining room for dessert and we'll talk about it." The room was decorated with pineapples, toy airplanes, plastic leis and Hawaii posters. Cowabunga!

Two cool gift-related Hanukkah notes:

• Gelt is a traditional gift at Hanukkah -- perhaps you can find creative ways to tuck coins (chocolate or maybe a $1 golden coin?) in with other non-traditional gifts.
   
• Because oil is an important symbol at Hanukkah, doughnut stands pop up all over Israel during Hanukkah. Get creative and wrap a gift in a doughnut box or, heck, give a box of Krispy Kremes or Dunkin' Donuts. Yum!
  
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