Children enjoy Christmas crafts enormously. Santa craft ideas are a good way of spending time together over the holidays, and no family can resist them.
Best of all, most of them cost nothing.
Santa crafts from what is in the house
Handprint Santa. A palm print in red for the hat, cotton wool for the trim and beard, and a face drawn in. Simple, and parents keep them for decades.
Paper plate Santa. A plate as the face, cotton wool beard, red paper hat. Large, satisfying, and almost impossible to get wrong.
Toilet roll Santa. A painted tube, cotton wool trim, cut-out arms. Stands up on a windowsill.
Footprint reindeer. A footprint in brown for the head, two handprints as antlers. Same principle, and children find their own prints fascinating.
A craft-a-day calendar
A nice idea if you have the time: one small craft for each day of December, in place of or alongside a chocolate calendar.
Keep them genuinely small – fifteen minutes each. A paper chain link, a star, a card, a decoration. The point is the daily ritual rather than the individual result.
Plan and prepare the materials in November, in labelled envelopes. Doing it day by day in December is how it collapses by the eighth.
Other free ideas
Paper snowflakes, folded and cut. Endlessly repeatable, and children are always surprised by the result.
Window decorations cut from paper and stuck up.
Wrapping paper, made by printing on plain or brown paper with potato stamps or handprints. Genuinely useful and it looks lovely.
Gift tags cut from last year’s Christmas cards. Cheap, sustainable, and it gives the old cards a use.
Nature decorations – pine cones, twigs, dried orange slices.
What makes them work
The same as any children’s craft. It should finish in a sitting, forgive imprecision, have no single right answer, and produce something displayable.
Christmas has the advantage that everything made goes straight on the tree or in the post, so the result is visible immediately.
Keep them
Store the decorations flat in a labelled box. The ones made by a six-year-old become the ones everybody looks for twenty years later.
