Christmas Shopping at Op Shops

This list of ideas is my encouragement to you to incorporate secondhand stuff into your Christmas gifting. Your local op shops (thrift shops / secondhand shops for non-Australians) are a glorious treasure trove of items that you can put together or repurpose into gifts your recipients will genuinely enjoy receiving. Going secondhand also adds a lot of fun creativity to the Christmas gift process. It’s impossible to plan precisely, as what you will find very much depends on your local op shop. However, below are some seeds of ideas. I have very helpfully bolded all the elements you can find in the op shop so you can use them as a rough shopping list.

Games

Op shops are a great way to find new board and card games to try, because if the game isn’t great, you haven’t lost much and you can just re-donate it. Often you can find new board games still in their packaging as well as secondhand ones. You will occasionally have a bummer result by opening up a secondhand game box to find some crucial piece missing, so if you’re going to gift a secondhand game, open it up and examine it first. If the box isn’t in great shape, you could repackage the game as suggested for the craft kit below, or alternatively you could redecorate the box by gluing on wrapping paper or collaged magazine pictures.

Face washers or dishclothes

Get the most colourful or interesting towels you can find at the op shop, and snip them into rectangles with pinking shears. This should (mostly) stop them fraying. You can then tie a mixed bundle of them up with ribbon, and add a tag explaining that they’re upcycled face washers or dishcloths or whatever your recipient will find most useful.

Plant in a mug

If you ever want to fill yourself with a queasy sense of horror, have a think about how many mugs must exist in the world. All the novelty, one-off, just for laughs mugs. The beautiful hand-made mugs, the personalised mugs with photos on. So. Many. Mugs. And so many of them are crowding the shelves of op shops, waiting for you to repurpose them into a cute little pot plant to give as a gift.

Your first step is to find a mug at an op shop. Depending on the recipient you have in mind, this could be something beautiful (depending on the eye of the beholder), awful (bad cartoons, jokes about farting), or so ugly it’s good (you’ll know it when you see it).

If you have a drill and a masonry bit, drill some holes in the bottom of the mug for drainage. If you don’t have a drill, immerse the mug upside down in a bucket or large bowl of water, and use a hammer and nail to carefully make a few holes. This method is not always successful, so ideally you’ll have a few mugs to work on so you’re not too disappointed when you accidentally destroy one. The crappier and cheaper the mug, the easier this will be to do. It’s quite difficult to hammer neat holes through more hefty and well-made mugs.

Stand back in satisfaction and admire your mugs-with-holes. Next, fill them with potting mix, poke a few seeds in, and keep watering them until they sprout. What to plant in them? Anything your heart desires. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that will stay in your pot, if you know your recipient is capable enough to plant it out or re-pot it when necessary. If you’re in the subtropics at the end of the year, you could go with herbs (basil, chives), or flowers (dahlias, borage, daisies).

Repackage a craft kit

Op shops are always a good source of craft kits, but they’re often a bit battered or look obviously secondhand. I am all for normalising giving secondhand gifts, but recognising that your recipients aren’t always of this frame of mind, you can do some repackaging. Take out the components of the craft kit, and put them in a small cloth bag or tie a ribbon around them. Include the original instruction sheet, or if the instructions are sparse or boring, try writing up your own instructions, including some personalised suggestions about why you chose the kit for this particular person.

Stuff in a jar

Find a selection of nice or interesting jars of different shapes and sizes. Fill them with things like… mixed sweets. Homemade biscuits. Homemade granola. A homemade cake mix for the recipient to bake. Homemade hot chocolate mixture. Leave it empty and attach a collection of blank cards and a pen, and tell them it’s a gratitude jar for them to fill. Tie a secondhand ribbon around the lid, create some written instructions if you’ve made a mix, and pick up some card or scrapbooking paper from the craft section to make a tag.

Make up your own craft kit

Find some bits and pieces from the craft section to make up your own craft kit. Ideas! A skein or two of wool and a set of knitting needles, accompanied by some printed off basic instructions on how to cast on and how to do a knit stitch. Repeat this with a crochet hook instead of knitting needles (apparently amigurumi are a good place to start with crochet, rather than making chains). Get a collection of stamps and an ink pad (you might need to get a new ink pad, there’s always stamps at op-shops but rarely ink), and package it up with some sheets of cardboard as a card-making kit. Buy a jar of buttons or beads, add some yarn, and package it up as a necklace or bracelet making kit. You occasionally come across quite nice as-new notebooks that you could combine with a pen. Many op shops have sewing patterns and a selection of material, if you know someone who sews.

Jewellery

You might find some earrings or a necklace that’s the perfect gift as-is. If you happen across some very cheap blingy jewellery or something partly broken, you could make a bookmark with a length of wide ribbon and a hot glue gun, decorating one end of the ribbon with a brooch or single earring. Or you could buy some flexible magnets (probably not at the op shop, let’s be honest), and hot glue some jewellery bits to them to make some very flashy fridge magnets.

Wooden boards and bowls

Wooden bowls, boards and salad servers can all be refreshed and revived with a good coat of orange oil, a food safe oil that you can buy at Bunnings. These are nice gifts on their own, or bowls can be a good base for a collection of edible gifts, either homemade or not.

Wine or beer glasses

No wine or beer drinker would ever turn down a new glass. Find a lovely single or set of wine glasses – these could be classic and plain, or something themed (there’s always a few glittery 18th and 21st wine glasses hanging around). Hunt around for a box or basket that will fit them, and a scarf to cushion them in. I am a frequent destroyer of wine glasses, and always appreciate an addition to the glass cupboard.

Men’s t-shirts

Not just for blokes. Anyone who likes to wear a comfy oversized t-shirt around the house, the garden or to bed might enjoy a well-chosen t-shirt. I encourage you to dig right through the rack and enjoy the search. Amongst the very boring department store t-shirts you can find apparel options to thrill the gift recipient who revels in the niche or tacky or unexpected.

Christmas tat without consumerist guilt

Purchase ridiculous Christmas themed novelty junk with a clear conscience. Yes, it will probably only give minutes of merriment, yes it might break, yes it’s plastic rubbish – but it’s plastic rubbish from the op shop. All op shops have had full Christmas displays through most of November, and there’s all sorts of novelties and decorations to be found if you really want to lean into the festive spirit. Will the beard lights below even work? I don’t know, it’ll be exciting to find out when they’re opened on Christmas day.

There are a million other ideas that will occur to you as you wander the aisles. I encourage you to go forth into the op shop wilds and embrace a bit of sustainable consumption this Christmas.