Christmas Traditions: Holiday Crafts

When I was growing up, the local recreation commission hosted an annual event for moms and kids. There were various Christmas projects and crafts for us. They even had a "secret" craft for the kids to make something for their moms, decorated sweatshirts. Even though my mom stayed home with us, we looked forward to going every year because it was fun and something different we got to do together. We made things from the classic reindeer candy canes to bell necklaces and if I remember correctly, we even got to decorate Christmas cookies to eat!
My mom loves to decorate for Christmas. In fact, she still has a lot of the ornaments we made, several boxes worth to be exact. She even has the first ornament I ever made. It's a walnut shell filled with batting. It has a bean peaking out from under a piece of cloth and ric-rac all the way around to hang it up. Growing up, she found little Christmas trees for my sister, brother and me to decorate each year and keep in our bedrooms. She also had a tree specifically for ornaments we made.
I was a preschool teacher for a year and I had fun with the Christmas crafts. We hung all of the ornaments we made on a tree in our classroom. We also made other decorations for the classroom. Here are a few examples:

Christmas Countdown: Each of the students colored a picture of Santa Claus' face and got to add cotton balls to his hat and beard. When all of the circles were filled, they would know that Santa came that night and Christmas would be the next day. (I found a picture on a website with free coloring pages. We started counting on December 1, so I added 24 circles and gave them each a bag with 24 cotton balls . Since we had circle time every morning, we used the date to help them.)

Paper Chains: I drew 1" strips on an 8" x 11" piece of white paper and then copied it on green and red paper. The students got to practice cutting, using a glue stick and making a pattern by alternating red and green.

Pinecone Christmas trees: This was a craft I did in school, but altered when I was a teacher based on what supplies we had in the closet. When I was in school, we used tissue paper and glue. I had the kids decorate the tips of the pinecone with various colors of glitter glue.

These are just a few examples. I think I found a craft project for everyday we had school during the Christmas season. I would have posted pictures, but I can't find my camera anywhere!