Christmas Crafts

My girls just LOVE crafts. They get so excited when a new crafting kit comes in the mail or when we are home all weekend so that they can craft. Recently, our town's bookstore (Inklings and More) came under new ownership, and they have created an entire back room just for crafting supplies. 💕 This may not seem like a big deal, but anyone who lives in a small town knows that conveniences like that don't come along all of the time. Sadly, they hadn't quite stocked their shelves in time for our crafts, and I had already ordered from
Amazon, but we will definitely hit them up for our next crafting adventures. This year, we set up 4 different crafts to complete over Christmas. The first one is our yearly homemade Christmas gift, but I can't give details (or show pictures) of that one until after Christmas.

Gift Tags

This one is pretty simple, but I thought about adding personal touches to the gifts we got people this year. Usually, I buy those little sticker to and from tags, so this was the perfect way to add that homemade touch.

For supplies, all I needed was some cardstock and markers. I cut out the tag shapes and wrote the to and from, while the girls decorated the back side. They enjoyed talking about what they were giving each person and put a lot of thought into what to draw on each person's tag.

Wooden Peg People Nativity Scenes

I have a really beautiful Willow Tree nativity scene that I adore. Each year, the girls ask if they can play with, and I sadly have to tell them no. That (and this pin I found) inspired our next craft. What I loved most about this was that I had very little set-up since I bought the peg people online. All I had to do was get out paints and paint brushes, paper towels, markers and playdoh for hair. As the girls were painting their people, they decided that baby Jesus needed a manger. After some quick thinking, I cut out pieces from an egg carton and filled them with straw. After just about an hour of work, the girls have their own little nativity scenes to play with.

Bah very focused

Boo setting her pieces out to dry

Finished product for Boo

Gingerbread Houses

This is a fairly traditional Christmas craft that is usually inspired by a week of Gingerbread Focus at preschool. Rather than buy a kit, we use graham crackers to create our houses. We also use left-over Halloween candy as decorations. The frosting recipe I use is simple: whites of 1 large egg and 2 cups of powdered sugar mixed until combined and then add drops of water to reach desired consistency. The egg white makes it stick like glue which is perfect for my less-than-patient builders. Despite a mishap of pressing too hard and destroying one house, the process was quite enjoyable. However, the girls were very unhappy when they woke up the next morning to see their ornery brother had stolen some candy decorations. Overall, though, this is a tradition we will definitely keep!