We lost our 5 year old son this July and I've been trying to find something to do for the last two months to keep his memory alive for my older son.  My friend at work gave me the idea of making an advent calendar and I went from there.  We took 25 of his toys and made them into ornaments by adding sparkles, hooks, and Christmas touches.  I think this turned out wonderful and we look forward to opening one each night.



Our Christmas Cootie complete with google eyes.  This one my son made  



Star Wars which was my younger son's favorite all time movie series.



A Lego heart made by my sister.



Lego Knight made by my mom.  

We had most of the family involved and everyone made a different ornament which really made this project special I think.  The best part is that my older son will have this for the rest of his life and he'll be able to remember his brother and all of their favorite toys that they played with.  



Next I made pouches with Christmas fabric and ribbons and hung each pouch up on a long ribbon along the fireplace with all of our stockings.  Each night we light a candle before opening the pouch.  Unfortunately the holidays can sometimes be difficult, but if anyone has recently lost someone and is having a difficult time getting in the holiday spirit I think a craft somewhere along these lines is a good starting point.  I know it really made my family happy    

This is my first time posting on craftster!  While this wasn't a craft made by hand so much it was really fun to do on the computer and turned out to be an excellent gift for under $10 frame included.  I used this for all of my fathers day/mothers day gifts and they all loved their mosaic pictures.  I downloaded a program for free from:
http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/
This program was very user friendly/free to use/and virus free...what more can you ask for?  For each one of my mosaics I used 300-400 pictures which made the repetition of using the same picture over and over much better.  The more pictures you have to use the more original the picture turns out.  There is also an option of using 1000 1500 or more pictures to create the picture you want. 
I filled each picture full of adorable grandchildren and their parents of course and picked a favorite theme for the main picture.  For one picture I used a black and white picture of the moon, another I used a dog, and for the cheesier grandparents I used a picture of them and kept it in color.
This took at least 3 hours between figuring out the program and finding that many pictures and organizing them into one folder to download, but it was totally worth it, fun and inventive.  What parent/grandparent doesn't want hundreds of pictures of adorable children?