How do you and your family celebrate during the winter holidays? There are so many different ways to get kids involved this holiday season. From making your own gifts and greeting cards, to volunteering time or goods to spread the spirit of giving to others. In my house, we have a number of things we do every year to spend time together and celebrate the season. Sometimes we stay close to home and sometimes we travel to visit family that live in other states. No matter where we are, we always celebrate being together with family.
Today I’ve joined together a group of fantastic kid friendly sites to share with you more inspiration for your own holiday creativity. Take a look around and share your own ideas for fun Winter Holiday project ideas and activities.
- Make a Borax Snow Crystal with Steve Spangler
- Teaching children about giving with Rainy Day Mum
- Spark some winter inspired creativity with Mama Miss and her winter sensory bin
- Learn how to make beautiful Hanukkah Lights at Creative Learning Fun
- Learn to make your own winter holiday subway art at Raising Figure Skaters
- Wonderful ideas for winter holiday activities at Housing A Forest
- More creativity inspiration at Here Come the Girls
Update, we have 3 winners, read below!
Let’s start off with celebrating YOU and your creativity. Check out the great goodies we’re offering.
Today we have 3 great prizes!
Enter to receive one of packages from Laura Kelly Designs: Family Planner, Mom Planner or Mom’s journal along with extra sticky notes or shipping list note pads. Plus a goodie bag filled with fun kid craft supplies. Each prize package is valued $30.
How to enter: Leave a Comment sharing your own Winter holiday ideas. Do you have a favorite activity, tradition, a craft you plan to make or something else that you and your family enjoy during the holiday season? Share your holiday inspiration and you could receive one of the great prizes we’re giving away!
The Rules: You must be 18 years or older and have a US or UK shipping address to enter. No purchase is necessary. Odds of winning are based on number of entries. Winner/s will be randomly selected after 7pm EST on Monday, December 3rd, 2012. If you are selected to receive a prize, you will be notified via email and you will have 48 hours to submit your shipping address or a new winner will be selected.
To Leave a comment, scroll to the bottom of the page.
Big congrats to our 3 prize winners:
Carla @ Carla Schauer Designs http://www.carlaschauer.com
Stacey Whitaker
Sue from http://girlcanrant.blogspot.com
Decorating cut-out cookies is our favorite tradition. They’re never pretty when we’re done, but the whole family laughs together as we ice and sprinkle stars and snowmen. My brother, sister, and I still laugh about doing it as kids, and my kids enjoy it just as much.
We are also a cookie decorating family :). We are also going to hang a felt tree this year on the wall with some felt ornaments so my little one can decorate his own tree over and over again!
We try our best to do “Light Em Up” from http://www.lillightomine.com – great planning guide and wonderful activities to remember those we sometimes forget. One of our faves is anonymously going to a friends’ house at night and chalk-drawing a sweet message of love/thanks for them to find, taping thank you cards to our garbage guys on the can lids and leaving money in vending machines!
The one real tradition we have is to watch Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather” every year. This year our little one is 4, so her big step-sister (age 17) is looking forward to some fun new projects and traditions to do with her. We’re starting today with Steve Spangler’s crystal snowflakes!
I teach preschool in Georgia so we rarely if ever get snow. In order to give the kids an understanding of the feel, temperature, melting points etc. of the fluffy white stuff I bring in several snow cone makers (the kind you plug in) and lots of bagged ice. My assistant, myself – and any parent that wants to bring in their snow cone machine – each sit at a table with a big black lawn trash bag in front of them. The students sit around and watch as we noisily make “snow”. They are fascinated by this. Just the volume alone gets them ooh-ing, aahhh-ing and giggling. After we all have our bags filled up (or the ice runs out) we put our gloves on and head outside to pour the “snow” into little plastic pools (the hard sided ones for toddlers). Prior to starting this activity we would have already set up the pools and sand type toys for them to play with. Things you will want to also have out there – and this is from lots trial and error – are tissues, blankets, and paper towels. We try to make snowballs and snowmen although usually unsuccessfully. We also talk about how ice is made (freeze water), what it feels like, where are some places that get a lot of snow (North Pole?), what is starting to happen to our ice and why (melting from sun) and all kinds of things that only preschoolers would think of in relation to snow such as “if I peed in this snow would it really be yellow?”… to which I answer it might but DON’T!!! Once inside we warm up and drink hot chocolate… okay….warm chocolate….. with marshmallows, read snowy themed books and pretend it’s going to be a white Christmas.
My daughter is only 3, so we haven’t had time to establish a lot of “traditions” yet. But, one that I will definitely be continuing this year from last year will be making cookies with her to give as gifts. She had a great time last year and now she can help more and be more involved, so I am sure it will be an ongoing tradition for us. I’m not a huge baker regularly, so this is really special for us for the holidays!
Every year, we make paper crafts and decorate the inside of our front door. The kids love making Christmas crafts, from Gingerbread houses to ornaments for the tree. I try to do one craft w/the kids a day, starting December 1st. We also do an Advent calendar. Thanks!
Each year the first week of winter break The kids and my husband make a stepping stone of their hand prints. We also make cookies and popcorn and have a Christmas movie night. The night before Christmas they open 1 gift and it’s a new set of P.J’s already washed and ready to wear. My husband and I each get to open one gift too it’s the gifts the kid’s made for us. Mine is the stepping stone and my husbands is a decoration of some kind made by the boys.
We like to decorate together, make our Christmas cookies and after the holiday is over creating our scrapbook pages together:)
navymansgrl1@yahoo.com