You can print the sleeve both sides at once on a colour laser printer, allowing about 2mm for the thickness at the fold. Then wrap it round a folded piece of 240 x 120mm thin white card and carefully cover both sides of the whole thing using a single piece of sticky-back plastic. If you forget to leave one edge open to get the CD in you can cut that opening using a razor blade. It looks a little better if you avoid air bubbles, but only a little.

There's still nothing that looks any more professional than a standard jewel case with a printed tray card and printed cover insert. Many of the disc replication / duplication houses have templates you can use if you have any graphic skills at all.

All you really need to do is disassemble an existing CD, and measure the cover insert and tray card. If you have Word, (or if you're lucky, Photoshop or InDesign) start with the cover and make a custom page size that's an inch larger than the cover's dimensions in both directions.

You can use images.google.com to find a suitable Christmas background that you like. Use their tools section to specify images of the highest resolution. For example, a tray card at 300 dpi print quality, needs to be at least 1800 pixels wide and 1500 pixels high. The higher the resolution the better, you can always scale it down. Drop the image into the word processor of your choice, and scale or crop it to fit your cover size. Add your name and album title, and possibly a picture of yourself wearing an ugly sweater, holding your saxophone in some improbable winter themed setting - you see where I'm going with this, you can be as cliched as you like. You are eventually (but NOT now) going to cut away that extra half inch border, so let the background go to the edges, but keep your text and images safely an inch away from the edges, so that when it's trimmed to size you don't cut off anything important. This will give you the nice pro looking full-bleed images (right to the edge of the paper without a white border). Most printers don't print borderless, so you have to cut the paper down to size after you've printed both sides. Since you're printing two sides, on say a letter-size piece of paper, you have to orient the printing to center your work in the middle of the letter size sheet. Flip it and print the other side. Remember that if you use cheap paper, and images that require a lot of ink coverage, you may have ink bleed through from the other side. A high quality coated paper would be better all the way around.

The inside cover might include a personal message, or the song titles inside the cover, with or without an image in the background, photos, real thank you's, fake credits (probably not a Parental Advisory Label) - whatever you like. Print this on the back side of the cover and THEN do the cutting. When you load the paper, make sure you know which side is the top of the sheet.

The tray card can be a continuation of the background you used on the cover (or not), song titles, photos, real thank you's, fake credits - whatever you like, same as before. Use some of the other CDs you own for inspiration. The tricky part with the tray card is accurately printing on the spine, and getting the fold for the spine scored and folded cleanly. The dimensions of the tray card have to be perfect to avoid gaps or bulging. If your Jewel case tray is clear, you also have the opportunity (and the challenge) of printing on both sides of the tray card as well. Same rules apply.

A DVD case (although non-standard for an audio CD), makes all of this a lot easier. All you have to do is measure, layout, print, and trim one single-sided sheet of paper and insert it under the clear cover - done. Remembering when laying it out, that with the page in "Landscape" orientation, the back cover goes on the left of the sheet, and the front cover goes on the right. And a title written down the spine in the center is a nice touch.

Otherwise, you're in for an arts and crafts project involving printing, cutting, folding, and glueing together your own card-stock CD jacket.

If you have software that can make use of the many templates out there online, it can really help by providing the correct dimensions and crop marks to help with the cutting. None of these are particularly difficult, but it does take some time (and practice) to do them well. Good software helps, but isn't a necessity. It's not nearly as important as a good printer, a good paper cutter, and being able to accurately read a ruler.

Good luck!

Thanks dvdhawk! You are a very skilled writer and I appreciate the long drawn out response.

Thanks, Colin, I hope that helps. It occurred to me that if there's a Staple or OfficeDepot store nearby, you might check to see if they have a paper product the Avery company makes #8693. It won't help do the tray card, but it might make the front cover insert easier. They are pre-perforated, so you can print them as if they were standard letter size, then snap them off cleanly at the perfs. (just like the print your own business card kits) It could save you a lot of cutting. There are other companies that sell pre-perforated tray cards too, but they'd be harder to find and have in-hand by Christmas, plus you probably don't need to do 200 of them.

And by the way, adhesive labels that you stick on the CD itself will inevitably fail. The adhesive breaks down, the label gets weird, and the CD gets thrown out of balance and wobbles while playing - not a good thing.

For better or worse, long drawn out responses are a specialty :)