Date Night Boxes–Fun DIY Christmas Gifts that Anyone can Make

When giving gifts, I love making things and I also love giving experiences. Both stem not only from my desire to keep waste and clutter to a minimum, but also my hope to give a personalized gift that will be enjoyed and cherished.

Leading up to this Christmas my boyfriend and I were talking about finances and inflation and fun, embarrassingly adult topics like that. Since making gifts can be more affordable than buying them, we also talked about how we would love homemade Christmas gifts from each other. That got my wheels turning and I came up with a way to combine my love of experiences and making things into one gift!

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The Easiest DIY Christmas Gift

I’m really excited about this gift idea. So excited that I’ve almost told my boyfriend and have been giving serious hints. I’m really horrible at keeping secrets!

So what am I making? Date night boxes! These are the easiest DIY Christmas gifts that anyone can make. While I’m making them for at-home date nights with my bf, these could easily be made for family fun nights, quality time with your best friend, or parent and child date days.

What is a Date Night Box?

A Date Night Box is a box (bag, container, etc) filled with items for activities. This can be anything you can dream up! You can base the boxes around a theme, an activity type, an inside joke, a specific topic, or really anything. Getting creative is part of the fun in creating a gift.

How to Make a Date Night Box

1. Decide on a theme/idea
2. Gather your items
3. Find a box or container
4. Create a label in Canva (optional)

That’s really all there is to it!

Since my boyfriend loves surprises (I hate them!), I’m adding an extra level of surprise to the boxes by not giving the full information for what’s inside. I’m labelling each box with a general label, but not details on the date.

Date Night Box Ideas

The fun part of making this gift for me was coming up with the ideas for the boxes.

To help inspire some ideas for your date night boxes, here are the themes I chose for mine:

1. DIY Dinner Date Night

We’re not big cooks, but we’ve talked about making sushi a few times. This was the perfect opportunity to make it happen! The great thing about sushi is that I can include a couple of the main, non-perishable items in the box and we can go for a walk to get the rest.

What’s included in our DIY Dinner Date Night Box:

• Seaweed
• Sushi Rice
• Sushi Rice Recipe
• Parchment paper to use as a sushi rolling mat
• Gift certificates for the grocery store (to purchase perishable items)
• Box with label and a note that this date includes a walk to the store

Budget note: Make this date night box budget friendly by using rewards or points to get the grocery items. I was able to redeem Air Miles for grocery store gift cards to include. Planning in advance means you can keep an eye out for deals on the non-perishable items you’re including in the box. Instead of buying a sushi rolling mat, Google tells me that I can use parchment paper, which is something you may already have in your pantry.

2. Game On! Date Night

Board games are such a fun night in! And they are an easy and affordable date night. Because we are shift workers, my goal for games was to choose ones that needed various levels of brain function–from zero function like Jenga to higher level of function like Exploding Kittens.

What’s included in our Game On Date Night Box:

• Board games
• Snacks

Budget Note: Make this date night box budget friendly by picking up second hand board games. Find games at your local thrift store or in your neighbourhood Buy Nothing Group.

3. Crafty DIY Date Night

Admittedly, this date night is more focused on my likes than his since I love a good craft. Creating things together is a lot of fun, though, so I took a chance and made this box. The idea is to create designs on plates with porcelain paint. I chose plates because it is something we can use more so than more mugs or bowls, but those are definitely options to use.

What’s included in our Crafty DIY Date Night box:

• Plates in a solid light colour (or mugs, bowls, etc.)
• Porcelain paint
• Paint brushes
• Container for paint brushes

Budget Note: Make this date night box budget friendly by shopping at your thrift store for the items you want to paint. I had a great number of white mugs, bowls, and plates to choose from at my thrift store. Check for a discount coupon at Michael’s before heading out to purchase your paints or craft supplies.

4. Movie Night In Date Night

The idea for this one really is a movie night in, but I created this date night box around an inside joke. My boyfriend gifted me a free copy of The Notebook that he had found a while ago. We’ve never gotten around to watching it, so I’ve made a date night box around the movie after finding a The Notebook madlibs activity online.

What’s included in our Movie Night In Date Night box:

• Movies (or homemade movie ticket)
• Popcorn
• Popcorn toppers
• Activities related to the movie (I printed out a “The Notebook” madlibs)

Budget note: Make this box budget friendly by finding movies at your local thrift store or by streaming movies on your already purchased streaming services. If you’re going to stream a movie, print out a homemade movie ticket to include in the box. You can create all kinds of fun things in Canva!

5. Couch Potato Date Night

This date was inspired by an online scavenger hunt I found online. Sometimes nights doing close to nothing can feel ideal–especially if coming off a series of night shifts! This is geared towards times like those ones.

What’s included in our Couch Potato Date Night:

• Online scavenger hunt cards
• Blank BINGO Card to dream up ideas for future things we’d like to do
• Snacks

Budget Note: This Couch Potato Date Night box is fairly budget friendly as is. The biggest expense is printing items out, but you can save a little by printing in black and white or by using digital activity cards.

Even More Ideas

There are so many different date night boxes you can make!

Some other ideas that you could make:
– Take YouTube dance lessons and try to master a style.
– Language learning apps with food from the country you choose to learn the language of.
– Other types of craft nights (like making lanterns or painting planters)
– Bake night where you bake a cake/cookies and decorate them
– Gardening date with seeds for veggies or flowers you can pick together later

If you were going to create a date night box, what would you include? I’d love to hear your ideas!

How to Make Date Night Boxes Sustainable

Not all of the items in our date night boxes are sustainable, but there are ways to lower the environmental footprint of the boxes your make.

1. Reuse boxes for storing the items instead of buying a fancy new box or bag.
2. Include items that can be reused or fully used up instead of items that will create waste.
3. Find items second hand instead of buying new.
4. Include items that are biodegradable, compostable, or recyclable.
5. If your date includes venturing out, include places you can walk or transit to instead of driving.

Sustainable Gifting Inspiration

For more ideas for homemade gifts and giftable experiences, check out our Sustainable Gift Guide.

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