Christmas Crafts Your Little Ones will Love

Whether you’re adverse to reams of sparkly tinsel or just can’t face forking out for not-so-cheap and cheerful decorations, home-made Christmas crafts are a great way to upscale your festive accessories and involve your little monsters in the whole glue-wielding, glitter sprinkling fun of DIY decorations*.

So we’ve collated the weird and wonderful to give you some great ideas for creating festive crafts with your little ones. Most of these involve food, recycling and creativity galore – perfect for cold, frosty days!

*Christmas Tree World cannot accept any responsibility for child-induced mess!

Home-made advent calendars

Home-made advent calendars are so much more heartfelt than shop bought varieties and in many cases, you can make sure the treats are more exciting and healthier too! You can make really beautiful fabric calendars simply by cutting out the pockets on old clothes and sewing them to a piece of tough fabric. Using pockets from different garments allows you to alter the sizes of the ‘treat pockets’ too – endlessly exciting for your little ones! Poor sewing ability isn’t a problem either, it all adds up to the charm and once you’ve created the basic structure, children will love decorating with buttons, glitter and badges.

Equally, one of the loveliest examples I’ve come across recently was a ‘match box pyramid’ created by gluing together and decorating a series of match boxes. Simply start with a row of 9 boxes, topped with 7, topped with, 5, 3 and 1! 25 days and a chance to put your own personality into the most exciting month of the year.

Scour the Garden: Simple Silver Pinecones and Conker Shells

Autumn is a fabulous time for foraging, so next time you’re out picking blackberries keep an eye out for conker shells and pinecones too, they make wonderful decorations and centrepieces for next to no effort. Once you’ve got your batch home give any conker shells a quick wash (they will rot to a greater extent than pinecones) and spray the pinecones and shells with silver craft paint. Wrap string around the pinecones and create a small hole in the soft conker shells for hanging string.

This is great for those who like a minimal theme – a woodland touch looks really elegant.

Recycle: Drink bottle icicles

Introducing children to recycling from a young age is really beneficial and you can do so much more with common household recycled goods than just ‘toilet-roll’ snakes! Take your average 500 ml drink bottle and look at the base, that ‘flower shaped’ formation makes for a beautiful icicle effect that’ll last for years. Simply cut out the base leaving around a 1cm of the bottle’s main body attached – this will make a good surface for loading with glitter, fabric and anything else you can get your hands on.

Home-made lollipops

Now it’s always best to prepare a generous batch of these – they might be destined for the tree, but it’d be a shame not to sample your efforts – these simple treats are delicious and cheap to make! Inspired by the traditional American candy cane decoration, lollipops are much simpler for little ones to make (candy canes require tricky sugar-pulling).

• 500g granulated sugar
• 1 tsp cream of tartar
• 200ml water
• 2 tsp of flavour essence (strawberry, peppermint)
• Colouring (if preferred)
• Silver sugar balls, stars and sprinkles
• Lollipop sticks (or wooden skewers cut in half)
• String for hanging

1. Put the sugar, water and cream of tartar into a heavy based saucepan and gently heat until the sugar has melted.
2. Once melted bring to boil. Be careful as the sugar will become incredibly hot, once a small spoonful sets hard when dropped in cold water, you’ll know it’s ready.
3. Remove from the heat and include any food colouring or flavouring.
4. Spoon around 1 tablespoon of the mixture onto a sheet of baking parchment and insert the sticks/skewers and sprinkle with the decorations.
5. Stick a small skewer in the top of the lollies while they set, this will allow you to thread hanging string through.

Inspired? We’ve tried to keep these ideas as sustainable and low-cost as possible, perfect for the kids and gentle on the pocket! Please feel free to send us your crafty images and we’ll showcase our favourites on the blog!

About the Author

Victoria is writing on behalf of Christmas Tree World, a specialist provider of green, black and white luxury artificial Christmas trees.