Christmas is a great time to spend with your family and what can make Christmas an even more special time, especially if you are a child, is making and creating your own Christmassy things. Whether it’s drawing something, creating ornaments or fun games to make and play, Christmas can be a fun time of year regardless of budget.
When I was growing up, particularly when I was very young and had only just started school, Christmas wasn’t easy those first few years due to my family really not having a lot of money. We didn’t have screens to keep us entertained (apart from a small television where we would watch Christmas movies) and as a result my family learned to enjoy the little things, and to find ways to create fun and games using very little and recycling and resuing what we could. To this end, today I’d like to share with you several fun things you can create with your kids (or even by yourself) mainly out of paper and card, to make Christmas that little bit more special and personal. These are very simple crafts and activities but they have been fun for me and my family to try out over the years at Christmastime. 🙂
You can skip ahead to see the different things to make by clicking these links below, or just scroll down to see how to make everything. 🙂
- Christmas hand drawn baubles
- Paper snowflakes
- Toilet roll snowmen
- Tinsel and Candy Canes (a Snakes and Ladders alternative with a twist)
- Quick draw Christmas guessing game
Christmas hand drawn baubles
There are lots of Christmas baubles out there that you can hang on your tree. In this activity though we’re going to create some fun Christmas babules from scratch, and the magic is not only in enjoying colouring them in, but also designing what will go onto each bauble design. For this activity you will need:
- Paper or thick white card
- Cardboard and glue to mount designs onto (if using paper to draw you baubles instead of white card)
- Pencil
- Cup, glass or a compass to draw circles
- Colouring pens or felt pens
- Scissors
- Thread or ribbon
First get a sheet of paper, or thick white card and draw circles on it by using a glass or similar object to draw around. A glass is a perfect size but you can make these baubles bigger or smaller. Make several circles on each paper/card or use several sheets of paper and card to make at least six circles.
Once you have your circles, at an extra square on top of each circle with a dot in it, this creates your bauble shape and the dot marks where you will later thread a ribbon or thread to hang it up.
Now you have your baubles here comes the fun part, it’s time to choose waht to draw in your baubles. Be creative and think about anything that might be circular in shape or indeed get children thinking not only of patterns but also anything Christmassy or personal to them that they’d like to draw in each shape. Below are some ideas for basic shapes and characters, but you can design anything you like! 🙂
Now colour in the designs. You can use colouring pencils as I have, or felt tip pens and even poster or water colour paints, it doesn’t matter what medium you use, the most important thing is to have fun and use you imagination to create something you like. 🙂
Now cut out your baubles and if you created them on paper, stick them onto a sheet or card or cardboard using glue. Once you have your finished designs on card, it’s time to make a hole in the top (obviously adults will do this part) using a sharp object like a needle, the end of a compass or a pencil, depending on how solid your card is. Thread some ribbon or simple cotton thread through the hole and tie together to create a bauble that can be hung up on the tree.
If you’re feeling more creative you can glue some baubles back to back to create double sided baubles to hang on your tree.
These may not be round ball shaped baubles, but they are created with fun and are unique to you, and children will love creating something that’s personal to them, so why not see what designs you or your kids can create out of a simple round circle. 🙂
Paper snowflakes
Snowflakes always look beautiful and it’s amazing how easy and fun these beautiful things are to create at home. Children of all ages can enjoy designing their own snowflake patterns and the magic comes when you finally unfold these to see what you have created. For this craft you will need:
- Sheets of paper
- Pencil
- Scissors
The first thing you need is a square sheet of paper. You can buy square sheets of paper such as origami paper, but creating a square out of a rectangular sheet of paper is easy too by simply folding the paper as you can see below, diagonally, until you have a square folded over, and mark and cut off the end that sticks out.
Now you have a sheet of square paper.
We’re now going to create the shape that helps us to make the snowflake. First fold this square paper in half.
Then fold it in half again.
At this point you could draw a design on this folded sheet of paper and cut it out, but this will create a sort of square shaped snowflake. This looks fine but in order to create a more round snowflake you need to cut off the top of the folded paper to make it look more like an ice cream cone as you can see below.
Now comes the fun part, drawing a design with different shapes on the outer edges. You can really draw any shapes you like, see show many different snowflake patterns you can create!
Once the shapes are drawn simply cut them out. For children doing this get some child safe scissors or make sure there’s an adult who can help. As you can see there are a lot of interesting shapes on the design above and once you’ve cut them out the paper should something look like this…
And now unfold the paper to reveal the beautiful snowflakes! You can hang these up by attaching some thread to them or stick them on windows or place then on the Christmas table, there’s planty of places you can put them and using dofferent coloured paper can make the snowflakes look dofferent and special too.
There’s no end to how many beautiful designs you can create, and here are a couple of the more ‘square’ designs I told you about which look very pretty too! 🙂
Toilet roll snowmen
It’s always fun to find new ways of re-using what we have in the house, and you can create some fun and simple snowmen with just few items and something everybody has in their home, toilet rolls! You can also use the snowmen in a fun game afterwards. For this make you will need:
- Toilet rolls
- White poster paint (if toilet rolls are not white)
- Paints or felt pens
- (optional) ribbons and glue
The first step to creating your snowmen is to paint you toilet rolls in white poster paints if they don’t already come in a white colour. I’ve been trying out some bamboo toilet rolls which already have an inner core which is white in colour so I’ve skipped painting them…
Once you have a white toilet roll it’s time to decorate it. Use either felt pens or paints to create some fun snowmen designs. Don’t forget to add a carrot for their nose and some coals for their eyes, mouth and buttons…
Now you can put a scarf around your snowman. You can use a real piece of ribbon tied around the snowman and glued in place, or simple draw a scarf onto the snowman and maybe even a hat too…
Now you have your snowman, create more of them, try doing different facial expressions and giving them different scarfs and hats! And once you have a whole set you can place them around the house, tree, or even better play a fun game with them on Christmas day!
If you want to have some fun why not try placing your toilet roll snowmen on the floor like bowling pins and use a scrunched up piece of wrapping paper, a balled up sock or other ball to try to knock as many down as you can. Arange them in different ways and see how many you can knock down at once. The person who knocks down the most in one throw is the winner 🙂
Tinsel and Candy Canes (a Snakes and Ladders alternative with a twist)
When I was a young child, we couldn’t always afford to buy the latest games and although we had a lot of second-hand or cheap board games at home, one tradition we ended up creating back then, and one I still keep to this day, is to make andd create a new home made board game every year. These games are often very simple and are alternative versions of existing games, but it is fun to reuse old cardboard like cereal or tissue boxes and other items and see how many new and different ways we can play an existing and well-known game. This year why not try this by creating a new and fun twist on the classic board game of Snakes and Ladders. This game is easy and simple to make and fun to play, and the process of making it can be a lot of fun too. 🙂 For this you will need:
- White card, or recycled cereal or similar sized box
- Pencil and ruler
- Colouring pencils or felt pens or paints
- Scissors
- Blu-tack
- Counters and dice to play game with
In the following picture you can see I’ve recycled an old large box which is luckily very white in colour, but it doesn’t matter about the colour of the card especially if you plan to use felt pens or paints to colour everything in.
The first step is to draw a typical snakes and ladders board of 100 (or less) squares in a grid shape. You can take the time to measure these squares out and choose how big they are according to how big you want your game board to be. in order to have 100 squares you will need 10 squares across and 10 high, but you can also free draw as I have below, where I didn’t have a proper ruler for measuring my squares and just created a rough game board that was more rectangular in shape! Also you may notice that my game board has eleven by seven squares in a grid so it only has 77 total squares. But it doesn’t matter what size you make the game board, as long as you have fun making it and have fun playing the game afterwards. 🙂
Along with the game board also draw some candy canes and snake-like shapes that will be your tinsel. Draw these in various sizes and try to make at least five candy canes and five pieces of tinsel…
Colour in your game board and the tinsel and candy canes and once they are all coloured in also add the numbers to the game board beginning at 1 in the left hand bottom corner and going along and upwards until you reach the top with the highest number. To make the game board more fun you or your children can also add little Christmassy designs to the individual squares, make it as fun and unique to you as you like 🙂 …
Cut out the game board and the pieces of candy cane and tinsel using the scissors. Now you should have a game board ready to play and your pieces of tinsel and candy cane on the side…
Now comes the fun part of setting up this game and why this snakes and ladders style game comes with a twist! 😀 Using the blu-tack take small pieces of it and place it on the back of the tinsel and candy cane pieces and then fix them to the game board. Candy canes are like ladders and the tinsel is like snakes. The fun part of this is that you get to choose where to place the tinsel and candy canes and each time you play this game you can arrange the board differently. Just make sure that each end of a candy cane and tinsel touches a square, have the candy canes act like ladders with the top of the cane being a higher number than the bottom, and the tinsel acting like a snake leading someone down to a lower square on the board. Have fun arranging the board in different ways: maybe you want all the candy canes near the top of the board, or want all the tinsel to be on the left? .Whatever you choose is fine, just have fun arranging it and then get ready to play…
Once you have set up your game board, you are ready to play. Get some counters and a die to play and just like with snakes and ladders, try to be the first to reach the top of the board! Remember that candy canes are like ladders so climb up a candy cane, and slide down the wavy tinsel if you accidently land on a tinsel square. If you want an additional bit of crafting, why not also make some counters out of some more card too. You can make little personalised counters, or make little fun Christmassy designs on them , just make sure each one is a different design or different colour to the others. 🙂
You can have fun playing this game again and again, and by using the blu-tack you should be able to re-use the candy canes and tinsels over and over but in different patterns, making this game more fun to play than traditional snakes and ladders. 🙂
Quick draw Christmas guessing game
As you can probably guess from this post, my family and I really love creating things and drawing. Drawing is always fun in my family and more so when we turn the act of doodling and drawing into a fun game. This is a fun, simple and quick game to play where all you need is some paper, a few prompts, and your imagination. You will need:
- Paper
- Pencils or pens
- Timer
- Blindfold
First, create some prompts on a piece of paper or card. These will be the things you will end up drawing, or attempting to draw, so think of a lot of Christmassy items and list them on separate pieces of paper. Here ten Christmas prompts to start you off but there are plenty more to add so whatever you can think of do add it, the more the better. As you can see the prompts below are: Present, Robin, Reindeer, Xmas pudding, Xmas stocking, Xmas tree, Xmas cracker, Snowman, Santa and Candy cane, but you can add more complicated ones such as The Nativity or the names of Christmas songs, or films, etc. 🙂
Now to play the game fold the papers with the prompts on them and put the prompts into a hat or bag. Split everyone into two teams and when it’s your teams turn, you all take out a prompt from the hat/bag, not showing it to anyone and memorize it. Everyone in your team puts a blindfold on, making sure you can’t see through it and have somebody from the other team set a timer for thirty seconds (or for one minute if there are children playing or you just want a more relaxed game) and when the timer starts attempt to draw what was on your prompt but while blindfolded in the time provided. Trust me, this isn’t as easy as you think! In fact it is incredibly hard, even for people who are very good at drawing, and it’s especially difficult when you can’t see where you are putting your pencil, but it is so much fun, and you will probably end up laughing while you do this.
Once the timer rings everyone on you team puts down their pencils and take you blindfolds off. You’ll probably have a good laugh at what you’ve drawn and you can then ask you teammates to guess what it is you’ve drawn. For every correct guess your team wins a point and teams take it in turns to draw blindfolded and guessing and then timing the other team You can vary the way this is played by having just one team member play at a time when it’s your team’s turn, this can lead to a more relaxed style of game. If you have less than enough players for two teams you can still play this game. Just have fun drawing blindfolded and with a time limit and see if you can draw something the other person/people can guess. Most likely you’ll fall about laughing when you see what people have drawn, just like these attempts by me below…
Can you guess what these things are from the above prompts? Or how about an even tougher challenge, especially for those who are good at drawing. Why not try this game using your non-dominant hand! This is the result of the attempt by me, it’s getting really hard to guess these, I think the last one is meant to be Santa and his hat, lol😂!…
I hope you have enjoyed this post about some fun things you can make or do this Christmas. I plan to do more post like this in future especially for Easter and other special occassions too. Let me know if you plan to make or do anything special for Christmas either on your own or with your children. 🙂 And here is the list of things to do again with the links so you don’t have to manually scroll back up to see everything. 🙂
- Christmas hand drawn baubles
- Paper snowflakes
- Toilet roll snowmen
- Tinsel and Candy Canes (a Snakes and Ladders alternative with a twist)
- Quick draw Christmas guessing game
–This craft features in Twinkl’s Create Unique Christmas Gifts With Twinkl Art Gallery.
What do you think of these Christmas activities? Are you doing anything special for Christmas? Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂
The Strawberry Post 
These are cute little craft ideas.
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Thank you so much! 🙂 I haven’t done many posts like this and wasn’t sure if they’d be well received or not, but thank you so much! 🙂 ❤
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