Every year I bake cookies and package them up to give to my staff as holiday gifts. Each year the packaging changes and is something handmade by me! This year, I made a bunch of gift boxes to deliver the cookies in. The gift box is assembled using the Mama Elephant Gable Box die and some double sided tape. Before I could assemble them, though, I had to stamp some patterns on them and color them up!

Some boxes were cut from white card stock and others from craft card stock. Some had poinsettias and others had pine cones. I stamped most of them with Memento Tuxedo Black ink, but others I stamped with VersaMark ink and white heat-embossed the images. I then used either copics or colored pencils to do my coloring.

While I was finishing up coloring all of the boxes, I had to bake some cookies to go inside! This year I made four different kinds:

• Saltine Toffee (So quick and easy, and delicious!)
• Snowball cookies  (I used almond extract in these instead of vanilla)
• Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip (These are my favorite! I omitted pecans this year but I think they’re better with them)
• Holiday Bites (still perfecting this one – mine never look perfect as the ones in the recipe photograph)

After I’d finished coloring all of the boxes, I cut widows in one side of them, using the same die set. Some had simple scalloped circle windows while others had a more ornate window that I gave a little dimension to by layering it on top of some fun foam. I then added some vellum behind the window. I thought about using clear acetate, but I used some Press’n Seal to line the insides of the boxes so they wouldn’t get dirty or greasy on the outside, so a clear window would have been obscured anyway.

Then it was time to start adding my mini gift tags – more about those here.

In addition to the stamped and colored boxes, I also made some solid color boxes, just to change it up a bit. I wanted these solid boxes to be just as fancy as the others, so I added my jazzed-up mini tags onto those boxes.

I managed to fit about 6-ish cookies into each of the boxes. It generally went like this: One snowball, one chocolate chip, 4 holiday bites and several pieces of toffee, broken up. Sometimes I’d add an extra snowball, if there was room.

I really love how they turned out, and I had a lot of fun making them!

Happy Holidays!