Christmas crafts

We really got into the Christmas spirit this year. Once again I have to say that having a kid really makes it so much more fun to do crafty or holiday related things.

Right after Thanksgiving, I started talking up all things winter and Christmas.
We visited the Holiday department at Target several times, watched the Santa Claus themed video from Baby Einstein literally every morning (right after breakfast Katherine would request 'Watch Santa Claus on the tv!' which was nice because in the time she watched Santa I was always able to shower and get ready... Win!).
I got her a 2 foot tree and some small ornaments and she had a blast putting those on.

We went to visit the big Christmas tree and the singing bears in Birkdale Village - check it out here.
I was surprising myself in coming up with all kinds of crafty little projects for her. I found out that the dollar bin at Target is a treasure trove of supplies and ideas. I bought these cool foam penguin and gingerbread man cutouts which you could then decorate with stickers, gems and whatever you wanted to. Here is what we did.

We did lots of drawing of Christmas trees, Santas, snow men etc.
I had a huge book of Christmas stickers which we would attach to a big sheet of paper and draw around them. It was so much fun.

And finally, I went digging for toilet paper rolls and we did some cool crafts using those plus some card stock, stick on eyeballs, pipe cleaners and sequins. This trio was the bomb! She loved playing with them.

Of course at this stage I did most of the work and she either watched me or played with something else next to me and participated when she felt like it. She loved putting the sticky items on everything.

We also did several baking sessions making Christmas cookies (she was all about Cookie Boy, which is what I told her the gingerbread man was called, her sitter was cracking up about that). We baked a big batch for Daddy to take to work for his team in little goody bags, then one batch for us and another big batch for the grandparents. Total mommy fail here though as I did not take any pictures of the final product. They were beautiful, if I might say so myself... Oh well, next year. I am planning to make it our annual Christmas tradition.

This is all I have...

We do have a short clip of us cutting out the first batch. It was so funny to see her when she realized that cookie dough is sweet and yummy. She'd always try to sneak little pieces in her mouth. Oh and she loved licking the frosting off!

Then I decided to also start a tradition of doing salt dough hand print ornaments with the year stamped on, to document how her hands are growing. We do not have any prints either in clay or on paper from when she was a newborn. They don't do those things in Switzerland and I didn't think to plan ahead. I made a hand print last Christmas from a store bought kit, but I misplaced it somewhere. So that's why doing salt dough sounds like such a good idea. No need to go chasing after a kit anywhere. All ingredients are already in the cupboard.
Here they are baking in the oven.

And finally, on Christmas Day we built and decorated a gingerbread house. Initially we were not planning to do it, but seeing how Katherine totally got into the Christmas spirit and fell in love with the giant gingerbread house we had in the hotel in Seattle when we stayed there, we just had to do it. She had a blast decorating and was very specific about where she wanted each type and color of candy. Again, she loved licking the frosting (she called it 'crosting') and the candy canes (called them 'candy corns', guess Christmas came really fast after Halloween/harvest haha).

Super excited!

The music channel with Christmas music was on all the time and she loved dancing to jingle bells and Frosty the Snowman. She was obsessed with her red winter themed sweater and green socks with Santas. It was so much fun!


I'm sure next year will be even more fun as she will be more aware of stuff and understand more, but this year was still unbeatable!