The holiday season approaches, the nights draw in, and it becomes the perfect opportunity to spend time indoors making things with children.
Christmas is a good reason to get children crafting. The magic of the season is enough to fire up young imaginations, and handmade objects make genuinely welcome presents for relatives.
Why Christmas crafts work particularly well
There is a real purpose to them, and children respond to that. A decoration goes on the tree; a card gets posted to a grandparent; a present gets wrapped and given.
That is different from a craft activity done to fill an afternoon, and children treat it differently.
There is also the annual return. A decoration made this year comes out again next year, and the year after, and the child remembers making it. Very few children’s crafts have that kind of afterlife.
Cards
The classic and still among the best. Folded card, and whatever is to hand.
A robin is a good subject for a young child – a brown oval, a red breast, two dots and a beak. Simple shapes that can be cut from paper and glued produce a better result than drawing, because the shapes come out clean regardless of fine motor control.
Fingerprints make holly berries and snowmen. Cotton wool makes snow and beards.
Have the child write inside, even if the writing is barely legible. That is the part the recipient keeps.
Tree decorations
Salt dough is the standard because it works: flour, salt and water, rolled out, cut with shape cutters, a hole made for the ribbon, baked slowly until hard. Then painted.
Make the hole before baking. This is the step everyone forgets and it cannot be fixed afterwards.
Paper chains are the simplest decoration there is and children never tire of making them.
Gifts children can make
A decorated candle holder, a photograph in a decorated frame, a small pot of homemade biscuits. All manageable and all genuinely welcome.
The key is that it should be recognisably the child’s work rather than an adult’s project the child helped with. Grandparents want the wonky one.
Practical notes
Start early. December fills up, and glue takes time to dry, and paint takes longer.
Set up somewhere that can get messy and say so, so nobody is anxious about the table.
Prepare everything first. The gap while you look for the scissors is where attention is lost.
Do not fix their work. The slightly wonky robin is the point.
