Fun Holiday Crafts for the Whole Family

The winter season is punctuated by a number of holidays, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and more. And all of them provide you with the opportunity to get crafty and decorate your home in the spirit of the season. While there are certainly some projects that will be out of bounds for younger kids (anything involving a glue gun or an X-ACTO knife, for example) there are tons of crafts that the whole family can participate in. Here are just a few to help you while away a winter afternoon stuck indoors.

1. Greeting cards. This is an easy craft that every family member can have fun with. Even babies can add handprints in seasonal paint colors to cards for family and friends (and you can easily turn these hand stamps into little turkeys with the aid of a marker). And older kids will have all kinds of fun with stencils, stamps, stickers, embossing tools, free-hand drawing, and adornments like leaves, cutouts, and even family photos that they can glue in place. How about a family faces triptych a la Andy Warhol in washes of green and red? As you can see, the sky is the limit when it comes to creativity with homemade holiday cards.
2. Ornaments. There are so many options when it comes to ornament crafts that you may have a hard time narrowing it down. God's eyes made with popsicle sticks and yarn are a popular holiday fave, as are painted pine cones, glitter-laden Styrofoam globes, cotton-puff snowmen, and gingerbread stars, just for starters. So you shouldn't have any trouble finding ideas to try with the kids.
3. Paper snowflakes. This is an oldie but a goodie and it's one that school-age kids can take part in (younger children may not yet be able to use scissors). All you need is some scrap paper and scissors and kids can start folding and cutting cool (pardon the pun) designs. You can spice them up by coloring the paper ahead of time or adding glitter, foil star stickers, and other embellishments. Then hang them on the walls or string them together to make garlands for the mantle, the banister, or to display in windows.
4. Candy garlands. You can definitely go old-school with strings of popcorn to hang on the tree or decorate the mantle, but if you want to change things up this year, get a bag of colorfully wrapped candy (metallic foil wrappers are the prettiest). You will probably want to go with hard candy since chocolates and other soft option could melt and drip. But it's as easy as running a needle and thread through either end of the wrapper to add a piece of candy to your string. Even blunt needles made for children (like tapestry/cross-stitch needles) should be able to pierce the foil wrappers without stabbing tiny fingers.
5. Local crafts. If your area vibes towards the natural side, you may be able to collect all kinds of craft materials in your local environs, from fallen leaves, branches, and pine cones to cool rocks and driftwood. All can be used to create holiday crafts. For example, pine boughs can be twisted into a wreath, wrapped with ribbon, and studded with pine cones for front-door décor. Leaves can be decoupaged onto used glass jars (from jam or spaghetti sauce) to make seasonal candle holders. And long piece of driftwood could become a staff for your snowman to hold. Let your imagination (or your kids') guide you here and you're sure to come up with some incredibly crafty uses for outdoor items.

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