With Christmas just over three months away, a new trend in chocolate treats is emerging, offering parents exciting alternatives to traditional advent calendars and selection boxes. This shift focuses on unique, often personalized, chocolate gifts that promise to delight children and sweet-toothed loved ones during the festive season.

One innovative approach comes from Diane Webster, who runs an online sweet shop called ‘My Kind of Flowers’. Diane has garnered significant attention for her impressive fold-out chocolate boxes. These deluxe festive boxes are meticulously crafted, featuring four layers packed with a variety of popular chocolate bars and sweets. The center of each box also contains a small selection box filled with delicious treats, including classics like Double Deckers, Crunchie bars, Fudge, Twisted, Freddos, Milky Way bars, and Kinder treats. For those with a preference for sweets, the boxes also include Refreshers, WHAM bars, Chewits, Skittles, Drumsticks, and Vimto. Priced at £45 plus a £5 postage fee, these boxes have inspired many, with Diane even confirming that similar box structures can be purchased on Amazon for those looking to create their own. Diane started her business in April, motivated by a desire to keep busy after tragically losing her eldest daughter, fulfilling a long-held dream of owning a sweet shop. Her creation has been met with enthusiastic praise on social media, with customers eagerly placing orders for Christmas.

Beyond pre-made options, many are turning to DIY solutions to create equally impressive yet budget-friendly chocolate gifts. Social media user Hawkyard demonstrated a handy hack for making homemade chocolate hampers. This method utilizes a cake dummy or styrofoam shaped like a cake, a cake board, double-sided tape, and an assortment of chocolates. The process involves securing smaller chocolate bars around the circumference of the styrofoam with tape, then adding other treats like Ferrero Rocher to the top, and finishing with a decorative ribbon. Hawkyard also showcased variations using multi-packs of KitKats and mini Biscoff packets, emphasizing that combining chocolates can create larger, more impactful displays. This DIY project is celebrated for its cost-saving potential, especially when using multi-packs of bars, and offers a fun way to personalize gifts for any occasion.

Similarly, Facebook user Zarartisticflows shared a tutorial for creating personalized chocolate bouquets. This method provides a creative and appealing alternative to traditional selection boxes while saving money. The crafter’s tutorial involves attaching various chocolate bars, such as KitKat and Dairy Milk, to wooden sticks. These sticks are then arranged artistically in a bouquet display, inserted into a rectangular piece of styrofoam wrapped in brown paper. The final touches include adding homemade crepe paper flowers and enclosing the entire bouquet in decorative festive paper. This hack highlights the ability to personally select a loved one’s favorite treats, ensuring no unwanted bars are left behind. Furthermore, it offers reusability, as the styrofoam base can be repurposed for future gifts or occasions, making it a sustainable and economical choice for Christmas or any special event.

These innovative chocolate gift ideas, whether Diane Webster's elaborate boxes or the creative DIY hampers and bouquets, showcase a growing trend towards more personalized, engaging, and often cost-effective ways to celebrate the festive season, moving beyond the conventional.