Getting Personal This Christmas

Time has come for people to get their thinking caps on to come up with new and original Christmas presents. The perfect present will be a balance between being an amazing present, have a personal sentiment and not break the bank in doing so! That’s not too much to ask is it? We want to look at what gifts you can get that can be personalised for that special someone.

The fact is that you can get just about everything personalised for anyone. But you want to get more than a mug for someone for Christmas so these are gifts that are a little bit different but will hopefully be well received on Christmas Day.

Personalised Chocolates

More than a mug and twice as delicious, getting personal with chocolates could not be more straightforward. This is a great personalised gift that is sure to have any chocolate lover over the moon. It will be more of a question if they can bare to open it to eat the chocolate inside. With options to add both the name of the recipient and a photo of your self this is a simple present that won’t break the bank but show a bit of thought has gone into it. We have written a bit more about chocolate gifts for you to check out.

Image by: Cadbury Gift Direct

Etsy

For those of you that are unaware of Etsy it is a great online shopping site that allows people to upload items that they have made to be bought. It has a huge range of products on its pages, and we mean huge! With such a diverse range of items you are bound to find something to suit who ever you are looking to buy for. However, there is a section on the site that allows personalisation and it happens to be aimed towards Christmas presents. This really throws the doors open to getting something special that will be personalised for that special someone.

Image by: exousia.etsy

Message in A Bottle

Perhaps this Christmas you would like to send a message to that someone special. And why not do it in a rather romantically whimsical fashion and send them a message in a bottle. This is a little bit mushy but there is a definite romantic notion behind the idea which is sure to make the gift memorable. You can choose which bottle you would like and create the message contained in the bottle to mean a little more to the recipient.

Taste Book

This is a gift for the foodies. It allows you to assemble a cookbook made up of recipes from over 25,000 Epicurious.com recipes and create a book dedicated to someone close. We really like the option of uploading recipes to create a book that is made out of family recipes, this could be a gift to give to more than one person in your family bringing the family together through recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Image by: emily.laurel504

Your Novel

This one may be a little bit trashy but it is definitely unique. Your Novel lets you and a special someone in you life star in your own book. The titles are varied but you can be assured that if your partner is into trashy novels then they will love this idea.

Image by: comedy_nose

Fair Trade and Ethical Gifts

Christmas is a great time to do a bit of good for the world and help out those who are less fortunate. There are lots of different ways in which you can give an ethical gift, this could be planting a tree in someone’s name which you can then go and visit for years to come. You could sponsor a child or look to helping out a community through making a donation. We think that getting a gift that helps others is a great gift and it will be appreciated by the recipient, after all, they didn’t need yet another pair of socks.

Image by: nathamanath

Don’t Get A Gift

Perhaps you shouldn’t get someone a gift if you really don’t know what they want. The idea is to show them that you care about them so planning something together might be a better gift than an actual physical present. You could plan a day trip to somewhere that means something to both of you. Even creating personalised “IOU” cards would be a great gift allowing the person to use the cards to meet up with you.

We hope that some of these ideas have inspired you to look beyond the usual socks and scarves that many people will be receiving this Christmas. With a little bit of thought and effort you can find some gifts that will mean a lot to the people receiving them and everyone will feel that warm Christmassy feeling that is so special. We have put together a bundlr looking at other examples of gifts that you can get personalised for the Christmas festivities.

Where Did That Come From: Chocolate

Chocolate has been around for a long time, many of us have formed unhealthy obsessions with the brown stuff but have you ever stopped to think about where it came from? Thankfully we at CYB have taken it upon ourselves to have a delve into the history books and put together a quick guide to the ins and outs of chocolate history including some knowledge bombs that you can drop to amaze your friends.

Where it all began

A cacao tree with fruit pods in various stages of ripening. Taken on the Big Island (Hawaii) in the botanical gardens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let us go back, way back, to around 2000 bc in South America right next to the Amazon. It was here that Cocoa is said to have originated and played a large part in life at this time. It was consumed as a beverage as proven by ceramic vessels that have been found at this period. It was also used within their culture, the cocoa pods were a sign of fertility and were used within religious rituals. Many of the stones from Mayan temples and palaces have engravings of cocoa pods.

Aztec and Mayans involvement

Jumping forward around 600 years and we find ourselves in the Aztec culture and the cocoa pod was still going strong. In fact its creation had been attributed to their god Quetzalcoatl who, as the story goes, descended from heaven on a beaming morning star carrying the cocoa tree that he had stolen from paradise. Now, we are not saying stealing from the gods is a good idea, but we are glad he did. In both Mayan and Aztec cultures cocoa was the basis for a thick, cold, unsweetened drink called xocoatl. It was believed that this was a health elixir and as sugar was not known to the Aztec culture it was flavoured with different spices.

Chocolate hits Europe

It wasn’t until the 1500′s when the Europeans showed up and found cocoa beans being used as currency. The Europeans changed the way that cocoa was used by fattening it up with the addition of milk and refined sugar to make a sweeter, more palatable substance. This was the earliest form of chocolate and was consumed almost exclusively as an after dinner desert. It began a bit of a craze and was considered to be very stylish to be able to obtain some of this sweet desert. Over the next century chocolate spread across Europe and cocoa plantations began to grow in South America.

The modern day

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Czech Wikipedia for th week, 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the middle of the 1800′s the process of creating drinking chocolate had come  a long way since its original incarnation. Presses were now used to increase the amount of chocolate that could be produced, cocoa butter was also added to drinking chocolate that gave it a more pleasing taste. It was also around this time that cocoa as a confection was created by J.S. Fry and Sons, this was basically the creation of the modern day chocolate bar that we still have today. The Cadbury brothers then took this further and began to manufacture chocolate on a larger scale and created a chocolate empire that still exists today as chocolate gifts are exchanged all round the world.

Chocolate became commonplace and very popular. Switzerland became the leaders in the creation of chocolate and still hold a very high level of expertise to this day. Chocolate is one of the few things in the world which has been used as a real treat, it was used during the war as a way to give tired soldiers a bit more energy and is still given in the US Army rations today. It has also taken into space, not many foods can say that. It has gone beyond just another sweet treat and has such a history that it is part of our history.

Over the years chocolate has changed drastically, from a god brought cold drink to a product that you can pick up almost anywhere in the world chocolate has had quite a journey, we have put together a collection of chocolate images spanning the years of transformation. Who knows where chocolate will go from here, is there anywhere left for it to explore?