Christmas Party

Qing,

My kids love making crafts and decorations at the Christmas party I hosted for them.

Here are three party activities we've done last year:

"Recipe" Window Decorations: If you're good at cooking, this is a good idea that can kids can use your own homemade recipe to safely and easily paint on the windows of your house. We use water, food coloring, and icing sugar to make this Christmas party decoration. The recipe: Into a small bowl, sift around 1/4 of a cup of icing sugar. Then add a couple drops of water to make the paste (it needs to be thin enough to paint on the window but thick enough to use as paint). With food coloring, create different colors in different bowls. Ok, now you can encourage your children paint all kinds of Christmas designs, animals, flowers, snowflakes, etc. Ask them to do this with different sized paintbrushes (a toothpick will work well for making dots). Wipe the design off with a warm washcloth.

Real Indoor Snowman: You'll need three balloons, salt, felt, scraps of cloth, 1 large bowl, 1 medium bowl, and 1 small bowl, and a large pan or plastic container. Fill the balloons with water a day before the party, place each balloon in one of the bowls, and freeze. When the kids arrive, take out the frozen balloons and cut the balloon off. Place the ice balls inside a large plastic container one on top of the other connecting each with salt. The more salt you use the better they will stick together. Then allow the kids to put clothing and body parts on. The kids will enjoy watching as their snowman melts and seeing all the clothes floating in the water by party's end.

Handprint Christmas Tree: For this craft you’ll need colored paper, markers, glitter, decorations, glue and scissors. Have the kids trace their hands on green paper (they will need at least 8 handprints to create the branches of the tree (Tip: fold the green paper or hold a few papers on top of each other, so that when you are cutting the handprint out – you will get a few rather than one). Have them cut out a trunk from black or brown paper and that should be the first thing to glue down on a bigger piece of colored paper.

Before they start gluing the tree leaves, have them arrange the handprints first to create the tree, then glue them down. Have them cut stars out and glue to the top of the tree. Let them decorate the tree however they’d like.

Sincerely,

Judy Ellen
Califonia, U.S.A.

A nice idea for a Christmas party table centerpiece is to take a terra cotta pot, and with a glue gun, glue candy canes (side-by-side, standing on end with their hooks at the top) to the outside of the pot. Then tie a red ribbon around the pot and fill the pot with wrapped candies or better yet, a small poinsettia.

Kim Yul
Seol, Korea.

Hi Qing,

I have some fun Christmas party ideas for decorations here to share. My children like Santa so I made a North Pole for them. Here is what how you can make it:

Cover a large pole with white and red crepe paper and add a sparkly ball on top. You can write like this, "Welcome to the North Pole". Then just place it next to the entrance. Next, decorate your whole holiday party area with candy canes of assorted colors, put them in plant pots, and give one to each new guest that comes, disperse them on the table for more color, hang them with string from the ceiling, etc.

Another cool Christmas decorating ideas - Make Make Santa's boot and hang it from the ceiling!

This is a very exciting acitivity that I did with my kids. Just take an old boot, connect it to some red material. Don't forget to sow on some white fluffy things so that everyone understands that it's Santa's boot. Help your children take a piece of white cardboard and cut a plus sign in the middle (two slits that are perpendicular to each other). Finally, you should stick the Santa's boot into the slit, staple the fabric to the inside of the cardboard and fasten the cardboard to the ceiling. This is fun!

Terry Anderson,
London, UK.

Qing,

I made a Christmas party cake for the soldiers in my husbands unit.

I learn the idea from my friend (actually it was supposed to be a child's birthday cake). It was supposed to be smaller but I scaled it up in size so that I could feed everyone.

I added classic Christmas candy to give it a holiday feel. It was all chocolate. The snow was made from coconut. The trees were ice-cream cones as were the towers.

Really, after I finished it, every one just want to take pictures and no one would want to eat it, :) We really had a good time with this Christmas cake recipe, though.

Happy Christmas!

Angela W.
Murborne, Australia