I’m always on the hunt for fun, new birthday gift ideas. I’m a big fan of gift baskets or similar ideas as you can with my Dirty Thirty Gift Basket and the 30 Presents for 30 Years gift pile I did for hubby. One of my best friends recently celebrated her 29th birthday – next year I’ll be sure to come up with some other ridiculous 30th birthday gift idea for her! This year her gift centred around the colour orange. There were two reasons for this: 1) Her and I have a maddening love for orange tic tacs. 2) Both her and I are Dutch and she is an avid soccer fan. As the Netherlands soccer team wear orange jerseys, it only seemed fitting.

To assemble this gift, I visited the local dollar store. Her and I have a thing for compiling a collection of dollar store gifts for each other for birthdays and other holidays. All you need is a basket (ideally in orange – I didn’t have any luck finding one) and an assortment of orange gifts that the receiver would enjoy.

What’s in my Orange You Glad It’s Your Birthday Gift Basket

• fuzzy orange socks
• change purse that smells like oranges
• little orange beach chair candle holder
• orange tea lights for the candle holder
• notebook (although it’s black, the pages inside are orange)
• marker that smells like oranges
• plastic cup with orange polka dots
• Runts candy
• Reese Peanut Butter Cups
• orange tic tacs
• Zesty Nacho Doritos
• fox toy for her doggy
• cube for putting out cigarettes
• plastic orange flowers for decoration

Typically people wrap gift baskets in cellophane – this is entirely up to you. My friend is a no fuss, no muss kinda girl so I didn’t need to spend a lot of time making it look fancy. I tend to save the cellophane for specific gifts such as baby or wedding shower gifts, particularly to keep things contained. I want my friends and family to be able to enjoy their birthday gifts immediately thus I like to keep them unwrapped so they don’t have to mess with ribbons and can simply pull out what they want from the basket.

Using a single colour is a simple and striking way to assemble a gift. This doesn’t have to be limited to birthday gifts. You could make a basket of green items for your eco-friendly cousin or to put a different spin on it, make up a basket of green get-well items for your friend who is ill! An entire basket of pink or blue will stand out at a baby shower or all white items at a wedding shower. Red items for the recently engaged couple or black items for that friend going through a nasty breakup. The ideas are endless! Have you made a gift basket of all one colour before?