Employee holiday gifts feel personal when each person picks the flavor or scent, gets a line from someone they work with, and receives it at home. Something used at home, like a jar of marmalade or a candle, suits that best, because it goes where the person spends the holidays.
Letting people choose, adding a written line and shipping to their home cost little per person and work for 200 as easily as for 12.
Let each person choose
Choice is cheap. Early in November, send the team a short form with two or three options and a default for anyone who doesn't answer. Nobody has to guess whether the accountant likes grapefruit.
Good options differ in a way people have opinions about. Offer two or three of these:
- Sweet or bitter marmalade. Mandarin and Navel Orange are among our sweeter marmalades; Duncan Grapefruit is the bitter, peel-forward one. To skip the form, The Medalists ($24.99) sends two jars that everyone gets: Navel Orange (Silver) and Minneola Tangelo (double Bronze), both honored at the 2026 World Marmalade Awards.
- Orange blossom or rose. The $60 California Garden Candle we pour is sold in two scents, Orange Blossom and California Rose, and the cloche over it outlives the wax.
- A themed box. The Gift Box Sampler ($95) has four versions: Citrus, Floral, Fruit, and a best-sellers mix. Inside every version: two medium eaux de parfum, one essential oil, a jar of marmalade, four lip balms and the family's Gill Orange Soap. It suits a small team or a milestone year.
- A lip balm 4-pack ($12.99) in citrus, floral or fruit scents, with Simply Beeswax as the unscented choice.
Put a "none of these" line on the form, especially if grapefruit is an option: some people avoid grapefruit for medical reasons, and our grapefruit jars say to check with a physician.
Are gift cards a good holiday gift for employees?
They're easy, but in the US a gift card to an employee is taxed as pay. The IRS's page on de minimis fringe benefits is direct: cash and cash-equivalent items "are never excludable from income", and gift certificates redeemable for general merchandise are taxable. They go on the W-2 with withholding.
A tangible gift is treated differently. The same page lists "holiday gifts" among benefits small and occasional enough to leave out of wages. There's no fixed dollar line, but the IRS notes it has ruled in one case that items worth more than $100 couldn't count. The $24.99 Medalists set is well below that figure; the $95 Gift Box Sampler is close to it.
That applies to our own gift cards too: they're a fine present for a friend, but for staff, a jar or a candle keeps the payroll department out of it. We're citrus growers, not tax advisers: your payroll provider or accountant decides how each gift is reported, and the rules for gifts to clients are different.
Ship employee holiday gifts home, not to the office
Many teams are never in one room, holidays or not. In August 2026, 21.6% of US workers teleworked at some point in the survey week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in financial activities the share was 51.2%. A box on the reception desk in mid-December waits for people who aren't coming back until January, and a jar of marmalade is heavy to carry home on a train.
With our multi-address shipping, the whole team list goes into a single cart and is paid for once. You assign an address to each gift or group of gifts. Ask HR to collect addresses privately, and let people give a different address for December if they'll be with family. Two limits to plan around: fragrance can't travel by expedited or international air service, and heavy glass like marmalade is excluded from the complimentary shipping we offer at $50. Expect 1–3 business days of processing, often less.
Bulk pricing for larger teams starts with a quote request on our corporate gifting page: tell us headcount, delivery date and budget. There's a step-by-step walkthrough in our post on shipping gifts to everyone on your list.
One line, written by the right person
The note matters more than the box, and it has to come from someone who works with the person. A company-wide message signed by the CEO reads as a form letter the moment two colleagues compare cards.
Split the list among team leads, a dozen names each, and ask for one specific sentence: the project they carried, the month they covered for someone, the customer who asked for them by name. For a single gift, the gift-message box in our cart carries that line to the recipient. For a whole team, have each lead mail or hand over a card the same week the boxes arrive, so the note and the jar land together. Our Winter in California cards reproduce a card from our family archive, sent by our great-grandfather from Southern California to relatives in Pennsylvania, and leave room inside for that line.
Photo by Leone Venter on Unsplash.
