(1) Perpetual Calendar
This is one of the gifts we have made over the years for our whole extended family…one for each household and tailored to our family tree.

We created a template with 12 year old daughter Kelly’s awesome Kelly Comics and added family birthdates, First Sacrament dates, family Patron Saints’ dates and over time we continue to add any monumental firsts and family events and the dates that our loved ones have passed away.

It used to look like this!

You can create one like this too, with your own collage of family pictures.  Once you format one and record your key family dates, you can make copies for a treasured gift for your whole extended family!

With all the calendars we have made, we like to print the pages and glue them into a dollar store spiral-bound sketchbook.  It’s durable, with a nice cardboard back cover and it gives us a chance to glue a nice custom front cover on as well.  We use clear contact paper (also from the dollar store)  to preserve the front cover.  This is an idea straight out of A Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families.  See the original Equipping Catholic Families post on Perpetual Calendars.

How about a Family Guess Who Game of familiar faces.
We made the family versions for both sides of our family last year for Christmas…so we have the deluxe version with both sets of templates.
You can make templates with pictures of your family and friends.  Imagine what funny questions you can ask to narrow the search, given how well you know your loved ones!
Check out my templates for a Saints version of the Guess Who!?

(3) Family Treasure Chest

We collected award certificates, newspaper articles, Sacrament certificates, report cards, a filled-out family tree, favorite pictures, special letters or cards between family members, birth announcements or special family newsletters, family trivia and any other special artifacts recording our family history. 
We made photocopies of each article, creating collections for each family of relatives.
We created a treasure chest out of a laundry box to store all the articles in and presented each treasure chest to a different family, reminding them that they can continue to add to their collection.
This is also an idea from A Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families

(4) Photo CD

Having collected the family photos over the years and even scanning older pictures from family albums, I have quite the collection of photos!  One Christmas, I compiled a CD of all the favorite family photos I could find, organizing them into a different folder for each family.  Each family received the whole collection on a CD full of photos.  As the collection grows…it may require a DVD which can be formatted as a slide show as desired.

(5) Picture Book

We have created a number of photo books…sometimes with captions
and sometimes illustrating a crazy story
made up by my husband and the kids.

We even made up a whole spy story with our pictures from our trip to Australia.

Now, there seem to be endless photo book services online to create a photo book and have it printed professionally, but we assembled our own with bristol board,
scrapbooking paper and prong fasteners.

(6) Family Cook Book

Collect the special family recipes from as many relatives as possible.  If possible…request them to be hand written on index cards.  Scan or photocopy, organize and assemble them into a scrapbook or album, making copies for each family.  Your local printshop can spiral bind pages for an easy-to-use version. 
You may even want to make special copies for the young adults who are starting out on their own!

(7) Photo Coasters & Trays

(8) Family Trivia
Start building a list of questions and quotes for a special trivia game.  Perhaps you could enlist each family to come up with 5 or 10 questions to even out the playing field.

(9) Family Movies

What are your ideas for Homemade Extended Family Gifts?

you’ll find it in the Treasure Chest…

(well at least some of these ideas. =)

Links of Light Bulbs (9) is brought to you by Equipping Catholic Families, a division of Arma Dei.