If you are a little more creative or have some time you could think about making some homemade presents. These are great for children to give to teachers, friends, grandparents etc The site Santas Postbag has a whole range of ideas for homemade festive gifts from pot plants, knitting projects and toys.

Edible Christmas Gifts are always a big hit – there is a great selection of ideas at Net Mums including cakes and biscuits, savoury ideas and chocolate and sweets. Remember to have some lovely ribbon and a gift tag to make it special. Below is a simple recipe for some Gourmet Mint Chocolates.

Gourmet mint chocolates

300g white chocolate, finely chopped
½ tsp peppermint essence
50ml whipping cream
75g plain chocolate
100g clear peppermint sweets, crushed

 Arrange approximately 36 foil or paper sweet cases on a baking sheet. Place the cream and 225g of the white chocolate in a bowl set over hot water and allow to melt, mix well. Do not allow to overheat. Add the crushed peppermints and stir until melted. Place the mixture in a piping bag with a plain nozzle, and three-quarter fill the cases. Flatten the top with a wet finger. Chill until set.

 Place the remaining white chocolate in a bowl over hot water and stir until smooth. Pour into a greaseproof-paper piping bag. Melt the plain chocolate in a bowl over hot water and stir until smooth. Pour into a greaseproof-paper piping bag. Cover the tops of half of the mint sweets with white chocolate, put a blob of dark chocolate on the top and draw a cocktail stick through to give a heart shape. Cover the remaining half of the chocolates in the same way but with reversed coloured chocolates. Leave to set.

 Many people are nervous about banking online but there are a lot of things you can do to make it safer for you.  Here are our top tips to stay safe online:

• avoid easy to guess passwords such as your name or date of birth
• ignore emails or calls asking for personal information
• use anti-virus and spyware software along with a personal firewall
• check your transactions regularly for any you do not recognise

Phishing explained

Phishing is the name given to the practice of sending emails purporting to come from a genuine company operating on the Internetin an attempt to trick customers of that company into disclosing information at a bogus website operated by fraudsters. These emails usually claim that it is necessary to “update” or “verify” your customer account information and they urge people to click on a link from the email which takes them to the bogus website. Any information entered on the bogus website will be captured by the criminals for their own fraudulent purposes.

Trojans explained

Trojans take their name from the term ‘Trojan Horse’ and are a type of computer virus which can be installed on your computer without you realising.  Trojans can be capable of installing a “keystroke logger”, which captures all of the keystrokes entered into a computer keyboard. Some specifically seek to capture passwords entered at certain web sites, by capturing keystrokes or taking screen shots of sites you visit. This information is then sent to the fraudsters over the Internet.

You can find out more on Bank safe online