Christmas Crafts

The Monday before Christmas, I knew I needed to finish up buying things for the stockings, as well as our groceries for the holidays. So, I called Grandpa Georgia to see if he'd like to join us on our trip to Walmart, and he said yes. I also ran into one of my friends there. I had good luck finding everything I needed, and Grandpa bought lunch to take back to his place and eat. He had asked me to help wrap his gifts for him, so it all worked out nicely. The other items I bought were things I needed to complete a few crafts. I knew Joshua would be missing preschool, and I wanted to keep the boys busy doing fun activities. Monday night I had a hairdresser appointment and afterward, Daddy & I organized all the gifts for the boys and made a list to make sure we had approximately an even number of items, etc. While we were organizing, we found the "make-your-own-ornaments" we had bought on Black Friday. I set them aside to make with the boys.

So Tuesday morning right after breakfast, we got started. First, the boys colored the Cars-themed ornaments. Each of them picked out three that they wanted to decorate, and amazingly enough, they didn't pick the same three.

Then they helped thread the string through the hole, and I tied them at the ends. You'll notice the boys are in their pajamas, but Joshua begged to not have to get dressed that morning, and I agreed. After all, we weren't going out anywhere. So, they didn't put on real clothes until after nap time. :)






Once they were finished making the ornaments, I let them pick places to hang them on the tree.

As they were working on their ornaments, I was doing some of the trickier cutting and prepping for the other crafts I had planned that day. I had seen both the tree and angel crafts elsewhere, and I thought they were neat ideas, so I decided to adapt them slightly for the boys & I to do together.

We started with the tree crafts. First, I made a free-hand cut of a basic tree shape on green paper and cut it out. Then I glued them to a piece of red construction paper for the boys and black for me (just to see what the different colors would look like). I had already printed out the boys faces for the crafts and cut them out, so I glued their face to the tops of the trees to be the angel. The craft I had originally seen had their hand print at the top, but I didn't have enough space for that. Those trees also weren't decorated very much, whereas that's where we spent most of our time.

I took a bottle of glue and made dots and then let the boys dump the glitter on. I will confess that it was a MESS as they learned how to shake the glitter bottle to get it in the right area. But, that's all part of the fun. The boys LOVED the different colors of glitter and how it sparkled!

When they were done with glitter, I also put globs of glue on and let them put the little fuzzy balls on that we had left over from Joshua's turkey feather craft. Caleb liked these way better than the glitter, whereas I think Joshua enjoyed dumping the glitter everywhere.

Here were our final creations:

Next, we worked on the angel craft. First, we cut a triangle shape out of white paper for the body and glued it to a blue piece of construction paper. Then I spread white paint on a coffee filter and both boys took turns pressing both hands into the white paint and then on either side of their angel. After they were both done, we quickly went and washed all our hands to get the paint off. Then we glued the pictures of the boys to the top of the triangle and put a circle of gold glitter glue on top as a halo. I asked the boys how we should decorate the triangle body, and both of them agreed on cotton balls ripped apart (other options included a fluffy coffee filter or doily). Then I cut out the Bible verses about the angels from Luke 2 and we glued them onto the remaining areas. Here are how the crafts turned out:

That night, our babysitter came to watch the boys and Shawn took me out to dinner using a gift card he had received. We were going to make it dinner and a movie, but the movie Shawn wanted to see didn't come out until that following Friday. Doh! So, we did a little unsuccessful shopping that evening and headed for home. It was a nice night out and a good day overall.

I love my little angels!