Preps as Gifts

My first introduction to any sort of emergency prepping was the BOB my dh's grandmother made him for Christmas one year, it was an excellent base to work from, and a lot of it is still in his BOB today. In fact, I wish she'd give us such useful things every year.

Preps as gifts can be as big or as little as you'd like. Car kits and BOBs are good medium size choices, especially if you throw in a book about prepping. Information is key. If you want to larger then that, make sure you pick something that suits the giftees needs and abilities. While everyone should eventually have a canner, it's not a good first prep gift for a non-cooker. If you want to go smaller,I gave my sister an emergency kit in a water bottle for her birthday. She's a college student and never without her backpack, so she shoved the water bottle in a pocket and I'm sure promptly forgot about it, but it'll be there when she needs it.

I used:
1 Lexan-type Wide Mouth water bottle (needs to be wide mouthed to get stuff into it!)
1 emergency space blanket
1 leatherman multi-tool thingie
1 mini-flashlight with extra batteries
1 poncho
1 powerbar
1 bag of electrolyte jelly beans (they looked cool)
1 tiny first aide kit
1 whistle
1 compass/signaling mirror
1 carabiner
1 mini-duct tape roll
and then I wrapped about 50ft of cord around the bottle in a turk's head.

Since I was mailing it, I didn't include matches, but I did tell her to go pick some up for it. It cost me about $30 as she is my sister and I got her both a nice multi-tool and solid compass. Both Eddie Bauer and someone else make commercial versions of the emergency kit in the bottle for about $10, though you'd want to beef them up.