Easy homemade stocking fillers – snowman soup and reindeer poo

I am now known as ‘poo girl’. An enviable moniker, I’m sure you’ll agree. And the reason for my impressive title? The huge quantity of bags of reindeer poo and  snowman soup that I’ve made to sell at the twins’ school’s winter fair for the last two years. I’m not taking the credit for the original idea – Pinterest came up trumps yet again – but I thought I’d share my take on these festive treats. Not only are they great for selling at a school fair, they also make fantastic stocking fillers, or little gifts for visiting kids over the the holiday season.

SNOWMAN SOUP: These are a bag of ingredients to make a couple of mugs of warming hot chocolate. I put in 50g drinking chocolate (bag this separately in a smaller cone cellophane bag, 16 x 22cm, so it doesn’t spill out to cover the other elements), about 20g chocolate chips (to make it extra chocolatey), and 20g mini marshmallows. All this goes into a 16 x 30cm cone cellophane bag. I use metallic twist ties for easy sealing (you need to seal the small bag of drinking chocolate as well the main bag), but if you were only making a few I’d finish them off with some lovely ribbon.

REINDEER POO: This causes great hilarity for the kids (and a small amount of consternation from confused parents). You can use any chocolate treat – Maltesers, Revels etc – but I favour chocolate-covered raisins because their less uniform shape means they look more like droppings! I just put around 30g raisins in a 7.5 x 12.5cm cellophane bag, and seal them shut with a couple of staples (or you can buy self-seal bags).

LABELS: Last year I faffed about with brown Kraft adhesive labels, but this year I went for a simpler (and cheaper solution). I used the labels template on Microsoft Word, but printed onto brown card instead of labels, and then used a guillotine to cut them out. A quick hole punched in the snowman soup labels meant those could be threaded onto the twist ties, and the reindeer poo labels were just stapled in place when I sealed the bags.

I’m linking up with this month’s #CreateMakeShare – read more about it and how you can share your creative ideas here.