Christmas gifts for piano students

[tdurfey]

I am wondering if anyone has any good ideas for a gift for each of my piano students (9).  Most are children.  I want to give them something but want to keep the cost down.  Any ideas you can share and websites to find them would be appreciated.
Thanks.
tdurfey

[donjuan]

My teacher gave all his students pencils at a christmas recital.  He probably bought a bunch of them at the dollar store, but there were eighth notes and treble clef pictures on it.  I wouldnt like it if I bought it myself, but I love my teacher so I treasure it simply because he gave it to me.

[Bob]

How about pencils?  They're fairly inexpensive and you're students will have one to write with at lessons.

[Spatula]

My teacher usually gave me some notebooks or stationary after recitals or on my birthday...it was always something productive or something associated with school or music or academics..

One time he got a me a desk calendar, a really cheap one, but I thank him for it because now with that I buy one every year and it makes me so much more organized! 

[galonia]

I know sweets are a very bad suggestion right now, with all the talk about childhood obesity, but my teacher used to hand out sweets twice a year - at Easter (chocolate eggs) and at Christmas (a senior student or a father of one of the children would dress up as Santa and hand them out at the end-of-year recital).  All the children would be extremely happy because no child dislikes sweets, and it was a rare event to receive sweets from our teacher.

[Bob]

Yeah, you also want to watch what you imply with the gift.  I heard of a boss that give employees lottery tickets.  Besides being a little tacky, it kind of implied their jobs were not necessarily stable.

So, pencils and stationery are good -- they imply learning.

I've also seen deals from music businesses for metronomes and tuners.  Sometimes, you can get a decent one for $10-15 if you want to spend that much.

Or, how about a CD?  esp if you could make one of their recital.

[faulty_damper]

Why not compose a short piece for each of them?  But in reality, all you are doing is writing a technical exercise because each of your students needs to work on something.  Sneaky and maybe even effective!

[chopiabin]

For graduation, my teacher bought me Urtext editions of some Chopin - it was one of the best gifts I've gotten.

[ChristmasCarol]

I gave a matched set of pen and pencil which had an eraser holder which had music all over it.  What a smash hit!  They cost $2.50