Investment Gifts

Let me start by saying that I personally do not like Christmas. I am a total Grinch when it comes to the holidays. It is too much about presents and not enough about just spending time with family. I hate trying to buy presents for everyone and I hate getting gifts that I really don't need from others. Every year I tell my family that my wife and I do not need anything, please save your money...they have yet to listen. My wife and I are doing pretty well financially, but I have 5 younger brothers and sisters that could really use the help much more than us. I would love to have the family concentrate more on their needs than ours, but that has yet to happen. OK...I am done complaining about Christmas.

What I really wanted to post about was what I would like to get for my brothers and sisters. We do not come from money, by any means. I have never really heard my parents talking about stocks or investing or anything, so those thoughts were never ingrained in me or my siblings. Investing is something that I learned about later in life and I wish that I had started earlier. Being the oldest of the 6 of us, I would like to start to get them thinking about money at an earlier age than I did. So I would like to get them some kind of investment vehicle for Christmas. However, I am stuck on how to do this or what it should be.

I was thinking of opening an ING Direct or Emigrant account for them or gifting some stock perhaps. The problem is that I have no idea how to go about doing this. I suppose that in order to open up any kind of account for them I would need to get all of their sign-up info and then just deposit some money into it. For stock shares, would I just open an E*Trade or Vanguard account and then gift shares electronically somehow or do I need to get paper shares and then give them that?

What about other options that I haven't even thought of? Is there some kind of investment gift that I could give that would be even better? I would love some suggestions.