Three Fun and Crafty things to do from Home this Christmas
Like many, we’ve spent a lot more time at home than usual this holiday season. We have, though, managed to keep up the holiday spirit while maintaining our social distance. With Christmas only a couple days away, I’d like to share a few of the fun and crafty things we’ve done this season. The best part is, you don’t have to necessarily be very “crafty” to do these things.
1) Make Peppermint Garlin
Bryonna discovered this one while watching a Netflix show; I believe it is called Mr. Christmas. For this craft, you need a few bags or so of peppermint and a hot glue gun. We had two bags of peppermint, which wasn’t quite enough for our tree (but I think I made it look okay with what I had). I would suggest picking up three bags of peppermint to make a string long enough to wrap a few times around a large Christmas tree. On the show they used peppermints that had the plastic wrapping twisted at the ends. Ours were flat; they still worked, but I think the twisty ended ones would have worked better. So, use the peppermints with the twisty ended wrapping if you can.
The process is simple. With your hot glue gun, put a dab of glue at the edge of the peppermint’s plastic wrapping. Then, press the edge of another peppermint’s plastic wrapping to the dab of hot glue. Create a chain of peppermints by repeating this process. The plastic wrappings tend to hold well together with the hot glue.
2) Make a Gingerbread House
This one could be as simple, or complicated, as you want to make it. For the real baker out there, you can probably pull this off from scratch. For the rest of us, gingerbread house kits are available at many retailers this time of year. We picked ours up from Five Below, so it only cost us $5.00.
The gingerbread house was pretty simple to put together; which makes it a fun project (I recommend a glass of eggnog while building your gingerbread house). Once the four walls and roof are secured, it’s time to decorate the house. I find it tempting to try to follow the picture on the box, but the real fun is in coloring outside the lines. As you can see by the picture below, we went a little sloppy with the icing.
Next year, we might make two of these!
3) Make Christmas Cards
It might be a bit late to send out Christmas cards, if you want them to get there by Christmas that is. It doesn’t hurt to get some handmade cards ready for next year, though. Bryonna is the papercraft savant around here, so I was pretty happy with the designs she came up with. Bryonna put together a video recently about making Christmas cards. The video is linked below; use it for inspiration when making your cards. Do a few test-run cards. Get comfortable with making a basic card, then add to your designs.
Check out the video below for some card making inspiration!
And Happy Holidays!