What to Bring to Folks’ Houses: Wine

Picture this: it's one week until Christmas. You've already gone to five different holiday gatherings, have fought the crowds to finish your shopping, picked up gift cards for the teachers, and baked your special holiday cookies to gift to the neighbors. You are feeling great that everything is done, and done early! Then you get a text inviting you to a last-minute gathering. Great, right!? But you look around and realize you have nothing to bring for your hosts. Everything you've already purchased and baked is spoken for and there is not enough time to run out and grab something.

I think we have all been in this position more than once in our lives. Whether it's a last-minute party you were invited to or you just completely forgot to pick something up when you were at the store, either way...we've all been there. I hate to admit it, but this is my usual experience with holiday get-togethers. It could literally be a yearly tradition and I will still forget to grab something to bring.

So what do I do? Well, last year my husband was out of town for Christmas (it's a normal thing in his career) so our very good friends invited me and our two little boys over for Christmas dinner. Of course, the inevitable happened and 30 minutes before we were supposed to be walking out the door, I realized I didn't have a thank you gift. Ugh. I thankfully keep all of the gift bags I get throughout the year and was able to find one that could work for Christmas. I then scoured the house looking for anything that I could gift.

We get a really great wine delivery each month that sends us award-winning wines from boutique wineries in California. The California Wine Club, it's a subscription gift from my FIL and we usually immediately put the wine up and only bring them out occasionally. I grabbed one of the older, nicer bottles to bring over and then also found a large candle that I (surprisingly!) had not lit yet.

Thankfully, the wine was a huge hit with the roast that our friends made (is wine ever not a hit!?) and we had a great time. While I do usually always bring a bottle of wine when invited over for dinner somewhere, this was the first time I had grabbed one of our nice ones from our subscription.

It also got me thinking how great subscription boxes are for this exact purpose. I rarely love every single thing from a subscription box, but I know lots of people who might. Instead of giving them away to friends throughout the year, I've started to put them in a box and will be going through them this holiday season to give as small gifts or thank you's. I've become big on not keeping too much in our house (thank you, Marie Kondo!), so this also helps me to gift even more than I usually would. If I don't absolutely love it, it goes in the box to be gifted! As a bonus, it also helps to keep the spending down around the holidays as well. A win-win in my book!

What are your go-to last-minute gifts? We'd love to hear them!