Carefully handmade presents to trap relatives in an endless cycle of guilt

One Christmas when I was in my mid-twenties I knitted sweaters for eighteen friends and relatives. I had lots of energy. I didn't have a boyfriend. So my way of channeling a cascading libido was to knit. And knit.

And knit.

Knitting was wholesome. And I got something out of it too, besides the calluses and the reduced sex drive, and that was the smugness of knowing that I'd put a lot more into my gifts than my relatives had put into theirs, which meant I could make unreasonable demands on their time and attention for the next decade.

After twenty years, that decade is almost up. (I was forced to double the length of enforced gratitude period when people stopped returning my calls.)

Homemade gifts are a unique expression of that very special part of ourselves called taste. We all have it. I say we foist it on others.

This year, my handmade gifts are easy enough to execute, although they look complicated and even over-produced, guaranteeing that your relatives will feel guilty.

Cork a Doodle

My recycled cork trivet is a fine example. Designed to hold a hot pot, serving dish or teapot in a manner that is both cocky and corky, the trivet boasts insulating properties and an attitude that says, "Yes, I drink, but look at the creativity it spawns."

Note: Cork, which is harvested every 10 years from cork forests in the Mediterranean, is a noble material that doesn't deserve to be discarded after one use. If anyone points and laughs at your trivet, cleverly woven together with festive copper wire, tell them that cork harvesting is one of the best examples of a sustainable agro-forestry system, and that choosing wine with natural cork stoppers as opposed to bottles with plastic stoppers gives you a chance to help the environment and save the cork forests of Portugal from destruction by keeping the demand for cork high. Not only will you appear well informed, but you'll also be irritating. Relatives will ply you with fermented beverages to make you lighten up. It's good to have a goal.

Wrap Master

Homemade wrapping paper has been a Ruffman family tradition since the ‘60s. We'd gather around a shoebox full of busted crayons and decorate huge sheets of cheap paper with bad poetry, cartoons drawings or just wild detonations of colour.

At some point the Velveeta cheese would be served and my brother and I would wad it into tiny balls and pelt each other while Mum had her back turned. To this day, December bring memories of cheese projectiles.

Our wrapping paper was meant to be reusable year after year, but the newsprint we used was so lame that it rarely made it past one season. I've found a way to make it last.

The secret is coating the paper with a flexible, colourful layer that will make it outlive even a newborn. To make your own wrapping paper, get a big pad of boardroom flipchart sheets, available at office supply places.

Put gobs of acrylic paint on a sheet of wax paper to serve as your palette. Then take a palette knife and dip it into a few of the colours, so there's a drippy multi-coloured mess on your knife. Start smearing. The paper absorbs the colour so you can spread it thinly. Cover all the white, so the entire sheet has colour on it.

Using iridescent acrylic colours (copper, gold, silver) adds a glittery touch and can lighten the mood if you're in a lurid phase of excoriating sourness owing to too much Christmas music being played on radio stations.

Use yarn, lace or thin strips of polar fleece to bind the paper around your gift, or just use clear removable tape so the paper won't be damaged.

For Sweater or Worse

Use up leftover yarn by making a sweater worthy of the Grateful Dead. Use any sweater pattern but gradually change the colours by blending multiple shades of mohair with the yarn as you knit. This gives you a zany watercolour effect that takes a lot of nerve to wear. But you probably have at least one relative who's up to it.