Nice present: take a piece of wood, mill a ring and drill a hole for a tea candle. Also cut a old wine bottle (milky ones giving a better effect) - so you great a great (wind resistant) candle.
For milling the ring I have used a jig on my router and added some extra holes allowing air to flow towards the candle, otherwise, it would run out of oxygen :-)
Cutting the bottles are well described in the web. The method: use a glass cutter to score on the position you want to cut, heat up carefully and abruptly cool down in cold water. The result is a clear and accurate cut, you only should sand down for safty reasons. In case you get various cracks in your bottle, you probably have heated too much. Try to work gently and find out the right time for heating up (took a couple of bottles)