Crafting Kindness: Christmas Edition

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We finally got our Christmas craft delivery to the kids at the hospital. And it was only 4 days late! So they will have to recount the amount of paper strips in each paper chain kit. But the days just got away from me with Thanksgiving the weekend before. I had so many ideas of crafts for the holidays and obviously we couldn’t do all of them. So in the hospital kit, we put things to make paper chains, bracelets, candy cane ornaments, build a Santa, and the Christmas tree ornament. The rest are just ideas of crafts that I had for my kids or my husband and I!

Paper Chain

This is great cutting practice if you have a child learning to use scissors. You could draw lines on the paper or just accept whatever kind of strips they feel like making that day. We have closed the loops with staples or tape. I help my 5 year old with the stapler, but I chose to do tape with my 4 year old. We usually do this on December 1st! Much sooner than that and it just feels like a lot of strips of paper.

Christmas Bracelets

These are fun for your kids to make as gifts for their friends! It in pretty inexpensive and you can make quite a few with just one box of beads. And if you get the alphabet beads, you can also personalize them for friends to make them even more special. We also used these same beads for other crafts, like the candy cane ornament below. The clay picture beads were clearly the favorites for my kids. I prefer the pearl beads (pictured below) over the normal pony beads, but I will say little hands work a lot better with the pony beads. The pearl beads have a little bit smaller of a hole to work with. And don’t forget to buy GOOD bracelet elastic.

Candy Cane Ornament

This blog has a great instruction sheet, although it is pretty self explanatory. We do this one most years because it is easy for everyone, including our youngest at 2 years old. If we get bored of the candy cane, sometimes we will try making a beaded snowflake ornament instead.

Build a Santa

This blog has the template for download and tons of other fun Christmas/holiday crafts. Building a Santa has probably been my kids’ favorite Christmas craft we have done so far. It involves coloring, cutting, and gluing.

Christmas Tree Ornament

This is like another alternative to the candy cane ornament or the snowflake ornament. All you need are a couple pipe cleaners and some beads. Perler beads tend to stay on better because the hole is smaller than pony beads, but either would work

Build a Snowman

I didn’t have a template for this. I just cut out 3 different sized white circles, an orange triangle for the nose, a scarf, some brown stick arms, and a black hat, mouth, eyes, and buttons. I threw this together in less than 5 minutes and my kids enjoyed designing their own snowman even if it wasn’t anatomically correct.

Paper Snowflakes

I recently came across a blog that has an easy snowflake template that tells kids exactly where to cut. We tried them out at they work great!

Christmas Village Window Stencil

I recently saw this on Instagram. I haven’t tried it yet, but I did find the free printable template! I am just waiting on getting a window marker. It is so cute!

Paper Bag Gingerbread House

This is our first year doing this one. I love that it is simple enough to do with markers, glue, and paper bags! This website has free printables for the roof, windows, and decorations.

Snow globes

This was something that just my husband and I did this year and it was fun! I got the idea what I was at dollar tree and saw their plastic snow globes. And then I turned the corner and saw mini Christmas trees and mini village people for the Christmas village and thus snow globes came to be our date night. I will say, the snow globe recommendation was to use a hot glue gun. I tried this 3 times and my snow globe was still leaking. So I tried super glue and it worked like a charm. If I did this again, I would just use super glue.

Hot Chocolate Mug

We made these last Christmas and the kids get excited when these get pulled out with the Christmas decorations at the holidays. We bought acrylic markers on Amazon and the cheapest mugs that Target offered. We followed instructions we found online to bake them so the marker doesn’t wear off. The marker still can scratch off though and ours have faded. But they held up through 2 Christmas seasons now. I would not recommend washing them in the dishwasher. But I felt like it was a holiday craft we could do each year. As it wears off, we just draw a new design for that year. And the kids love having their own hot chocolate in their own mug that they made.