Mountain Apothecary Holiday Gifts You Can Make by Hand

Come the middle of November, the drying shed behind my house up the creek outside Marshall is about as full as it gets all year. Yarrow and plantain cut in high summer, mullein, a little mountain mint, whatever root I dug before the ground hardened — all of it hanging in bunches or already crumbled into jars along the plank shelf. By then the growing is done and the giving season is coming on, and I have spent most of my sixty-one years turning one into the other.

My grandmother did not have money for store-bought presents, and she did not miss it. What she gave at Christmas came off that same shelf: a tin of salve, a bottle of infused oil, a paper twist of tea. I make the same things now for my own grandchildren and neighbors, and I will tell you plainly — a jar of something you grew and put up yourself lands harder than anything off a shelf. Here is how I go about it, start to finish, so you can do the same with what you gathered this year.

One thing I can’t hand you a link for yet: a set of wide-mouth glass jars for the tea blends and the infusing. Any clean pint jar out of the pantry does the work — I just won’t point you at a listing I haven’t stood behind myself.

A word before we start, and I’ll only say it once, the way I’d say it to anyone in my kitchen. Everything here is traditional and folk use — how the mountain people, and my own family, have prepared these plants for generations. None of it treats or cures a thing, and for anything serious you see a doctor. Give these gifts as what they are: something warm and homemade, not medicine.

Start with the salve — it’s the one everybody keeps

If you make one thing off this list, make a salve. It is forgiving, it keeps a year kept cool and dark, and a labeled tin of it is the gift people actually use up and come asking after next fall.

I lean on yarrow (Achillea millefolium — what the old folks around here just called soldier’s woodruff) because it grows in every sunny bank and roadside cut in Madison County and dries beautifully. Yarrow has been used on the skin on this continent far longer than my people have been in these mountains; the Cherokee used it as well, documented in Hamel and Chiltoskey’s Cherokee Plants and Their Uses, and I credit them for knowing this ground first. If you’d rather, plantain works the same way and is even easier to find.

Cover a jar of your dried herb with jojoba oil, set the jar in a pan of barely-simmering water, and let it warm low and slow for a couple of hours, until the oil takes on the color and smell of the plant. Strain it through a doubled layer of cheesecloth, squeezing the last of it out, then warm the strained oil again and stir in beeswax pellets — about one part wax to four parts oil — until they melt clear. Pour into your tins and leave them to set undisturbed. I walk through this whole process, jar to tin, in my post on making a simple yarrow salve if you want the longer version.

Test your wax ratio before you pour a whole batch: dip a cold spoon in the melted mix and let it set a second. Too soft, add a little more wax; too hard, a splash more oil. I learned that the year I gave out a dozen tins you practically had to chip at with a knife.

An infused oil, given as an oil

Not every gift needs to be set into a salve. A pretty bottle of herb-infused jojoba oil is a fine present on its own, and it’s less work — you stop at the straining step. Infuse a gentle herb like plantain or calendula the same warm-water way, strain it clean through cheesecloth, and pour it into a small clean jar or bottle.

Label it with the plant, the oil, and the month you made it. That label is not decoration. Six months on, an unlabeled jar of gold oil is a mystery, and a gift the person is afraid to use is no gift at all.

A tea blend from the dry shelf

The simplest gift of all, and the one my grandchildren can help make, is a tea blend. I keep it honest — plants I’ve grown or gathered and know cold, nothing exotic, nothing I can’t name. A little mountain mint, some dried bee balm, a few crumbled leaves of raspberry or blackberry off the fencerow, mixed in a bowl and spooned into a clean jar.

Blend by smell as much as measure. Mint wants to take over a blend, so I go light on it and let the softer leaves carry the middle. Tie a square of cloth over the lid, write out what’s in it and how to steep it — a spoonful in a mug of just-off-the-boil water, covered five minutes — and you’ve given somebody a month of warm evenings.

Package it plain and label it true

The mountain gifts I remember from my grandmother were never fancy, and mine aren’t either. A tin, a jar, a bit of twine, a handwritten label. What makes it a good gift is that it’s real — you gathered the plant, you put it up, and you can tell the person exactly what’s in it and where it grew.

Write the plant’s common name, the year, and one honest line about what it is: “yarrow salve, for rough hands and garden scrapes — traditional use, not medicine.” That plainness is the gift. It’s the difference between something homemade and something that only looks it.

Where the making ends and the knowing begins

The making is the easy part, and it’s a good afternoon with the grandchildren and the woodstove going. Knowing your plants cold before you gather and gift them — telling yarrow from its look-alikes, knowing which mountain herbs are safe to hand a neighbor and which to leave in the woods — that’s the longer study, and it’s the part I care most about.

Most of what I know about the medicinal plants of these mountains — how to identify each one without guessing, when to gather it, and how the people before us prepared it — is in my book, Appalachian Medicinal Plants. The salve and the tea are the easy start. The book is how you learn the rest of what grows in the coves behind the house.