It’s the perennial question, what do you get for the person who has everything? If you’re struggling to find a gift for a person who has everything, then you may consider choosing a food hamper or gift.

Food hampers are an ideal gift for those tricky recipients, as they show that you have thought carefully about your recipients tastes and bought something just for them. They can also be enjoyed by a whole family or shared around the office.

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If it’s a hamper or gift that you require, empty or bursting with delicious foods, wines and hardware then you need look no further. Virginia Hayward provide a fantastic selection of food hampers to suit every taste and budget.

From the smallest gift tray to 30 inch hampers, Virginia Hayward has a wide range of empty gift baskets and hampers, so that if you’ve got your own treats to fill a hamper with, you can create your own food hampers.

If you’d like to send a ready made gift then you can choose from our sweet hampers, through to more traditional hampers. Wines and spirits are also available if you require a gift for a colleague, friend or loved one.

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Despite the beautiful and lingering sunshine outside, we are incredibly busy designing our range of hampers for Christmas, but we’ve found time this morning to talk about the upcoming Whitsun festival.

Whitsun (also known as Pentecost) is  a Christian festival, originating from the pagan celebration of ‘Summer’s Day’ and is usually held on the seventh Sunday after Easter. The festival commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ. Unusually though, in 2010 the late May Bank Holiday has meant that the festival will be held on the 8th Sunday after Easter – 31st May.

The name is a contraction of ‘White-Sunday’ and derives from the white garments worn by catechumens, those expecting to be baptised on that Sunday.

The following Monday is known as ‘Whit Monday’ and the following week is ‘Whitsuntide’ or ‘Whit Week’.

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Following our recent post about how to pack a hamper, many of you have been in touch asking how best to ‘wrap’ a hamper.

Unless you’re preparing quite a small hamper, it’s very difficult to find wrapping paper of the right size. Also, as most hampers are natural products, rather than neat boxes, it’s even more difficult to wrap them neatly, so we wouldn’t recommend ‘wrapping’ the hamper – especially if you’re sending it in the post or by courier to your recipient.

We do recommend making sure that you have as few gaps in the hamper itself and between the hamper and its outer box as possible. If you follow the guidelines in ‘How to Pack a Hamper’, you’ll know exactly how to make sure that things don’t move around inside the hamper. If you can’t find a box that fits your hamper neatly (if you order one from our ‘empty hampers and baskets‘ section, make sure you keep the box that we send!) then pack around the hamper with crumpled paper (recycled preferably) until it fits snugly into the box.

The trick is to make sure that things can’t move about too much!

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We’re very pleased to unveil some of our latest hampers and gifts, including the fiery Chilli Cube, relaxing Picnic Delights and hearty Cider and Cheese Tray. These gifts and more can be seen here:

• Olive Treats – £24.99
• Chilli Cube – £34.99
• Cider and Cheese Tray – £34.99
• Enjoy the Garden – £49.00
• Picnic Delights – £50.00

As ever, we’ve brought together some of our favourite flavours and products to create gifts that will be well received by your recipients.

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Ever since we introduced our empty baskets and hampers category, we’ve been asked how best to pack a hamper so that it not only survives its journey to its recipient intact, but also still retains the ‘wow’ factor, or the special touch that it had as you fastened the lid.

Of course you’ll start packing your hamper from the bottom upwards, so that’s where we’ll start, but before you even begin, make sure that you choose a hamper which fits your goods as closely as possible so there’s very little empty space. Also, once you’ve decided on your products, put brightest, most impressive products to one side for your special top layer.

• It’s important to make sure that you put your heavy items at the bottom of the hampers, so that they don’t crush all the other goodies. We like to put a layer of cushioning, such as crumpled paper, on the bottom of the hamper and then rest any glass bottles of drink on the bottom of the hamper, individually wrapped so that if they do break, the liquid does as little damage as possible.
• Next, jars, tins and other heavy or rigid items go in on top of the wine. It’s also a good idea to make sure that you use some kind of filling (we use biodegradeable chips made from maize starch) to pack into any gaps, as it’ll prevent your products from moving around too much.
• Keep adding products and filling the spaces until you’ve only got the ‘top layer’ products that you put to one side left. Arrange these neatly on the top and pack around them with brightly coloured shredded paper or tissue paper so that your recipient opens the hamper to an explosion of colour and delicious treats.

We supply all of the essential and decorative packaging that you need, in our empty baskets and wicker hampers category.

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Designing hampers and gifts for Father’s Day has caused considerable debate in the office as to the spelling of the occasion! More particularly, it’s the placement of the apostrophe in ‘Father’s Day’ that sparked a lively discussion and it turns out that this tiny detail has been a talking point since the celebration was inaugurated in the early 20th Century.

Although the name of the celebration is often understood as a plural possessive (for example,  “day belonging to fathers”), which would normally be spelled “Fathers’ Day”, the most common spelling is “Father’s Day”, as if it were a singular possessive (i.e. “day belonging to Father”). Sonora Dodd used the “Fathers’ Day” spelling on her original petition for the holiday, but the spelling “Father’s Day” was already used in 1913 and it was still spelled the same way when its creator was commended in 2008 by the US Congress.

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Father’s Day is a little under 6 weeks away now and we’re busy designing hampers and gifts to mark the occasion. You can find the perfect gift for a Father in our Father’s Day hampers category.

The celebration of Father’s Day was inaugurated in 1910 and is celebrated on a variety of dates worldwide. The first observance of Father’s Day is attributed to Sonora Dodd, of Washington, following a Mother’s Day sermon that she attended in Spokane. She wanted a celebration that honoured Fathers like her own, a Civil War veteran whose wife died when Sonora was 16 and raised his 6 children alone.

The celebration was not officially recognised until the 1930′s though, resisted by Congress due to fears that it would become commercialised.

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In the light of the recent announcement of a coalition government, we though that it would be a nice idea to dream up a ‘Coalition Hamper’. It’s a tenuous link of course, but it’s an opportunity for us to think of a hamper full of blue and orange goodies, or treats that really shouldn’t work well together, but you hope that they might – like chilli and chocolate or strawberry and mint!

It’s not likely to feature in our range of Christmas hampers, or for that matter in our normal range of hampers, but it’s great fun for us to come up with these ideas and we’d love to hear what you think too, so if you’ve got a great idea for your own ‘Coalition Hamper’, please leave a comment on the blog or contact us to share it.

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We are very pleased to see 3 new Toyota Tonero forklift trucks amongst our fleet of materials handlers this morning. In an effort to continue the progress that we’ve made with environmentally friendly packaging solutions for our hampers and reduction of the carbon footprint with the recent planting of over 3,000 trees on site, the forklifts have impressive environmental credentials.

Fitted with the latest Toyota diesel engines, our Tonero’s clean-burning Toyota engines exceed the latest European directives on emissions, without any loss in power. The environment is a fundamental part of the Toyota Tonero’s design, with the trucks manufactured at Toyota’s ISO 14001-certified plant in Ancenis, France, and all components produced at ISO 14001-certified plants. The trucks are 99% recyclable at end-of-life, further reducing their environmental impact.

The trucks three stage 4.7m masts are particularly well suited to our extensive drive-in racking storage, across both of our sites. “Even though we have the capacity to warehouse approximately 4000 racked and 3000 non racked pallets, space is at a premium in our business, largely due to the way that we have to pack and store finished products from July onwards, prior to our peak despatch period in the days before Christmas,” explains Warehouse Supervisor James Osborn. “Drive-in racking allows us to be much more efficient with space than conventional racking, but we need forklifts with the reach capacity to get to the highest points of the racking and remain stable. The Tonero trucks allow us to do that and are amongst the most clean and reliable trucks on the market.”

See more photos on our Facebook page >>

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