Christmas Craft and a Movie
I have been browsing blogs this morning and found a super cute Rudolf (the red nosed reindeer) Christmas craft from No Time for Flash Cards. It’s super cute and easy to do so check it out.
And while we’re on Christmas I have to put a plug in for my favorite Christmas movie of all time, The Muppet Christmas Carol. I’m not really a Muppet fan but this movie is a favorite in my family and we used to watch it every Christmas Eve growing up… well since it came out in 1992. 
I have to say that they did a great job combining muppet characters and real people not to mention this was probably the only Christmas Carol movie that didn’t totally scare me or bore me as a child and still entertains me now. You can buy it for $10.49 on Amazon or look around in stores, I’m sure it’s in most stores this week!
Remembrance Ornaments
I’m calling these “Remembrance Ornaments” because they show what level/age your child is at for their creation and because it’s fun to see how your kid has changed over the years and how ornaments have improved. You can also add as many elements as your child wants. My son had a friend over today and he was excited to do a craft with us. He was much more patient and clean than my son!!
*Oh, and don’t forget to put your child’s name and the year on the back of the ornaments!
Before our friend arrived I prepped the table. Our local newspaper also prints the paper in town. After running the newspaper they have rolls of newspaper paper left over that they recycle. My husband grabbed me a roll and we put it on the table whenever we’re going to paint. I also used painter’s tape to secure the paper.
Materials I used:
Scrapbook paper (or any heavy-weight paper)
Hot Glue
Paint
Glitter
Glitter Glue
Sequins
Ribbon
Felt
*I used what I already had on hand. Feel free to do a lot or do something simple.
First the boys got painting aprons on and rolled up their sleeves then they got painting.
First Ornament:
We did hand prints in paint on red scrapbook paper. Then the boys wanted to use glitter glue. I put the sticks on before they used the glitter glue. My son’s friend was much better at taking directions to try to get glitter on the sticks.
Second Ornament:
They painted on red scrapbook paper again, used glitter glue, and then we used felt instead of sticks for a wreath boarder. Our friend wanted to put bells on his (sorry I forgot to take a picture) and on my son’s (he was finished with the craft by then) I just put red glitter glue on the wreath like berries.
Third Ornament:
Our friend just wanted to keep painting and painting which was great! So I gave him yellow paper, he wanted to use red paint. So he painted it red and then he wanted to put glitter on it. Gold and red. I originally thought this would be a star because the paper was yellow but then decided to make a traditional ornament shaped ornament! I even cut a rectangle out of some of the extra paper to make it look more like a ball ornament.
Heritage Ornament:
Two years ago my husband and our son took four generation pictures with his dad and grandpa and last year I made an ornament for my husband’s grandparents using those pictures. Well I forgot to mail it and dug it out with our Christmas stuff. My son pulled the ribbon out so I had to do some quick repairs on it but it’ll make it into the package for sure this year. This is a two-sided ornament.
Christmas Tree Shapes
I thought I would work on shapes and make a Christmas tree with my toddler. You can apply this to almost every holiday so feel free to adapt!
What you Need:
Construction Paper
Markers/Crayons/Paint
Glue
1. Cut out 3 large triangles, a star, along with any other shape you want to work on. I cut out “J”’s for candy canes, but you can also do circles for ball ornaments, and a rectangle for the bottom of the tree.
2. Let your child color or paint triangles, etc.
3. Glue together to make a tree.
4. Add ornaments.
5. Let dry!
Reindeer Ornaments
Okay, just for the record I’m not trying to give you holiday confusion with Thanksgiving and Christmas stuff all mixed together, but if you wanted to make these ornaments I thought it best to share them before Christmas trees were put up and if you are like me, the day after Thanksgiving the tree will go up and that leaves zero time for my ornament posts… now, on with the post:
I remember growing up we had candy cane reindeer ornaments on our Christmas tree. This year we were looking to save some money and so I decided to make our ornaments and among them I HAD to include the reindeer!
What you need:
Candy Canes
Pipe Cleaner
Pom Pom Balls for noses
Googly Eyes
Ribbon (optional)
Bells (optional)
Hot Glue Gun
I did some more traditional reindeer with the peppermint candy canes.
And I also did some fun, wacky reindeer with cherry candy canes.
My main reason for doing this was that I couldn’t find an all-red set of pom poms. I think as Christmas gets closer you’ll be able to find them. I also only made one Rudolf, so there is only one traditional reindeer with a red nose, the rest have different colored noses. So I thought I’d go all out and have multi-colored, fun reindeer.
How to make Reindeer:
1. Get your pipe cleaner and wrap it around the top of the candy cane twice, then twist the top to secure it. Shape into antlers.
2. Glue on eyes.
3. Glue on nose.
At this point you can call it good and hang these cute guys on your tree. I decided it would be fun to hang them and have them look like they were flying. So the rest of these steps are optional.
4. Cut a fairly long piece of ribbon (be sure to cut the end at an angle) thread on a bell.
5. Pull bell to the middle of the ribbon and wrap around the reindeer’s neck twice then knot.
6. Knot the end of the ribbon. Be sure to leave enough room that you can hang the reindeer on your tree!
You’re done! Doing the ribbon and bells does get time consuming. I ended up doing bells on half the reindeer and just ribbon on the rest. Feel free to even out antlers or curl them at this point. I also did two cyclops reindeer with funny antlers. Have fun!
Gratitude Wreath
I saw this on No Time for Flashcards and thought it would be a WONDERFUL activity for Thanksgiving and would be an easy and fun activity to do after the big feast is over and people are settling down, or in the days ahead to talk about the meaning of Thanksgiving and what it means to be thankful.
On the No Time for Flashcard’s wreath they say thank you in several languages but I thought it would be fun to have our family write down things we are thankful for in our lives.
What you need:
Construction Paper
Glue
Crayons/Pen
Paper Plate
Scissors
1. Trace Hands
2. Cut out hands and write what you are thankful for on them. While I cut out hands my husband worked with our son to write down things he was thankful for.
3. Cut out the middle of your paper plate.
4. Glue finished hands on plate. I used hot glue so we didn’t have to wait long before our son got to play with the wreath. We also put ours on our harvest display, it’s a little big for the pine tree but that’s okay! We also put our hand turkey from yesterday on the top of the wreath.
Hand Turkey
My little boy loves drawing turkeys with his hands so I decided we’d make them really look like turkeys… well kind of. I still don’t know of any multi-colored turkeys but that’s okay!
What you need:
Construction Paper
Scissors
Glue,
Crayons
Hands
1. Choose what color you want your turkey feathers to be.
2. Trace hands on construction paper.
3. Cut out hands and layer on top of each other with glue in between each layer.
4. Cut out an “8″ shape of whatever color you want your turkey’s body to be.
5. Glue to turkey feathers.
6. Cut corner off orange or yellow paper for a beak and a heart shape out of red paper for a waddle.
7. Glue beak and waddle, draw eyes with black crayon.
8. Cut out legs and color (optional).
9. Let dry!
Pine Cone Ornaments
The great thing about pine cone ornaments is that you can be as simple or extravagant as you want! These are the supplies I used but feel free to do whatever you want. Spray Glitter would make these a snap or adding sequins would be fun too! Or you can just buy scented pine cones, tie ribbon on them and hang them in your tree without any extra decorating. Mine are cinnamon scented. We’ll have a mix of decorated and non on our tree. These pine cones are great to do during the day for a craft or for family night activity.
Supplies:
Pine Cones
Ribbon
Glitter Glue
Pom poms (or sequins, bells or whatever you want)
1. I would suggest putting your ribbon on first. We didn’t do that and were sad when our pine cones were covered in glitter glue and we couldn’t get the ribbons on without dipping them into the glue repeatedly! I also tried to pick out cones that had some stem I could use to tie the ribbon on. If yours don’t, try hot gluing your ribbon on.
2. Decorate
3. Let dry. The glitter glue does take a while to dry to have a place prepared that you’ll be able to hang these while they dry.
Here are some pictures of our creations.
Halloween Candy Cookies
What is there to do with that extra Halloween candy? Well I decided to make cookies out of it. I got the candy bars that were left and added them into my usual chocolate chip cookie recipe, it ended up being really yummy and I have a few tips that will probably help make your cookies even better than mine!
Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
2 1/4 c flour
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 c butter
1/2 c sugar
3/4 c brown sugar – packed
2 t vanilla
1 egg
1 bag chocolate chips/ 2 cups chopped Halloween Candy bars
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In small mixing bowl combine flour, baking soda and salt – set aside. In large mixing bowl cream butter and sugars until fluffy. Add vanilla and egg, beat well. Add dry ingredients, mix well. Add chocolate chips, mix well. (Personally I add chocolate chips in with the dry ingredients.) Drop about 2″ apart from each other onto un-greased cookie sheets. Bake 10-15 minutes. Remove from oven, place on cooling rack.
Halloween Candy Addition Information
First I mixed up my cookies like normal. Then I chopped up the candy bars. Remember when you chop them up you don’t want them too small.
I ended up not using the Baby Ruth bars, and now that I’ve done it I would probably leave the Butterfingers out as well. They basically turned to dust when I chopped them up and then make the cookies stick to the cookie sheet after they were baked. I’d save them for homemade milk shakes instead of cookies. Also, I would suggest (if you can) doubling the amount of candy bars. I ended up add some chocolate chips, but by the end wish I would have added more.
Then I balled up the cookies and baked them. YUM!
Pumpkin Carving
If you haven’t already done it then you probably will in the next few days. We went to the pumpkin patch last week and got 2 pumpkins. One was to be a traditional jack-o-lantern and the other a cookie-cutter pumpkins cut out of a pumpkin. Unfortunately the big pumpkin (20-something pounder) didn’t make it. I discovered it had started rotting on Saturday. 
I did try to save it but it was too far gone and all I got was a sick stomach and a house that smelled like rotten pumpkin. So for the smaller pumpkin we did a face on one side and pumpkin cookie cutter on the other. I think it turned out pretty well.
Because most people have made jack-o-lanterns before I’ll just give a quick picture step by step without instructions with just a few comments.
I always clean the top of the pumpkin so you don’t have pumpkin hanging down by the flame.
This pumpkin was really thick so I trimmed down the walls.
Scooping out the insides.
Like I mentioned earlier the walls of this pumpkin were super thick, I couldn’t push the cookie cutter through so my wonderful husband did it. But we had to finish getting it out with a knife.
By the way, to get the permanent marker off the pumpkin when I was done I used Goo Gone.
Tune in tomorrow to see how to dry and roast pumpkin seeds!
Pirate Sword Craft
My son loves pirates, so what is he going to be for Halloween? A pirate. Pirates need swords don’t they? I didn’t want to spend the time or money looking for a store-bought sword and thought he’d love a homemade one just as much.
What you Need:
Cardboard
Heavy Duty scissors or knife
Foil
Paint (optional)
Glue
Glitter
Directions:
1. Draw out your sword shape on cardboard.
2. Cut out sword.
3. I decided to rip off the side of the cardboard that had pictures/packaging stuff on it. But if you are painting you might not need to do that.
4. Paint. I just sponged some on with a paper towel.
5. Cover with Foil.
6. Glue and Glitter your own design or add sequins or fake jewels.
