Personalized Money or Gift Card Holder

As you've probably figured out by now, I'm not really into giving gift cards or money as gifts. I prefer to pick something out for the recipient myself, but I understand this is not a perfect world and sometimes we must give a monetary gift.

I myself was in that situation last Christmas. I wanted to get Chuk a bike, because his had been stolen, but I knew he wanted a very specific kind. I asked lots of questions about what kind of bike he wanted, but I didn't want him to know I was getting him a bike, so I was asking in a conversational way, rather than getting a list of specs. Well, it was too technical and too complicated for me to understand the exact type of bike he wanted and I didn't want to blow a bunch of money on something that wasn't going to be what he needed. (I've since learned bikes are kind of like shoes; you have to "try them on" to make sure they fit your body type.) Long story short, I decided to give him the money to buy a bike himself.

I still wanted the gift to be special though because it's a little weird to hand your fiance a check and say, "Merry Christmas." Inspired by this post, I made him a pop-up money holder. I used a file folder, pictures cut out from magazines, and a photo I printed out on regular paper of Chuk to make a collage of him with a bike outdoors. Please notice the only picture of a bike I could find was a child's orange bike with training wheels and that the picture of road I had wasn't big enough, so I colored an extension with crayon. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be thoughtful. On the back, I pasted a heart-shaped leaf, leaving the top open to slide the money in.

He loved the bike. He loved the collage, especially that it was three-dimensional. And I love that he kept the collage displayed on his dresser for almost a year now. If you have to give a gift card or money, you might as well do it with style.