Unusual Christmas Gift Giving

I am always telling tells on myself here and today is no different.  When my nieces and nephew were early teens they were so hard to buy for.  I hated giving money because I felt like I was being lazy as the gift giver.  Now that I have my own teens, I realize that giving money is actually a good thing.  As the gift giver you just do not know what these kids are in to or wanting.  Their interests change so fast from day to day. 
My hubby and I decided one year that if we were going to give money we were going to make it interesting.  Here are two things we did for/ to our nieces and nephews. 
The hubby started telling his nieces and nephew that all they were going to get from us was a bag of nuts for Christmas.  Everytime we saw them he would mention this.  We took walnuts and cracked them so that they came apart in perfect halves.  I dug out the goodie inside.  We folded dollar bills very tightly and placed one dollar in each nut and glued the nut back together.   We gave them twenty one dollar nuts and one five dollar nut.  We threw in a few real nuts just to throw them off.  We put them in a stocking with a nutcracker and a Christmas ornament.
Christmas day when we were ready to open gifts, hubby passed out the stockings.  You would have thought we had given them underwear.  We planned for this, so hubby said he wanted a nut, he took one out and cracked it open.  When he pulled the dollar out they just about lost it.  You have never seen three kids cracking nuts like crazy.   Ahhh the memories.
When Sprat had come along we decided to take things to the next level.   I made chocolate pudding and we put their Christmas money in a ziplock baggie and tapped it to the inside of a diaper then covered it with the chocolate pudding.  I folded it up as if it were a dirty diaper and put it in a Christmas bag.   Well, you can imagine the looks and words that were exchanged.  It was all done in love and fun and once they realized it was in fact only pudding we all had a good laugh. 
So, if you are giving money do it in an interesting way.