Holiday Craft

Once our Holiday Storytime was over, we immediately went into the craft portion of our program. Since the program was all ages, we had two separate crafts set up. This helped with crowd control and reduced waiting time.

One of our crafts was a glitter pinecone ornament. I love glitter and this seemed like a simple and cheap craft to do. However, I didn't know that pinecones have huge spikes on them in Virginia! We had to trim each pinecone individually, and it took way more staff time than I anticipated.

To set up for this craft we had our box of pinecones, paper bags, and glitter all lined up like an assembly line. There were two staff members responsible for putting glitter in the paper bags. Once the child had their paper bag full of glitter, we sent them on their way to the table. The table was covered in newspaper and had paper plates of glue on it. They were instructed to simply roll their pinecone in glue, throw it in their bag, and shake, shake, shake! If you want to try this craft, make sure you tape up the bottom of the paper bag. It's amazing how much glitter can fall out of those tiny creases.

The second craft that was occurring simultaneously was a simple tissue paper covered snowman. I felt like the pinecone wasn't really crafty enough since all they really did was shake their bags, and I wanted to offer them a chance to really be creative. So after pouring over my craft cabinet and finding a ridiculous amount of tissue paper, I went again with cheap and easy. For this craft, the only prep work was cutting the tissue paper into squares and printing off a snowman template. The kids could glue as much or as little tissue paper as they wanted, and cut out their snowman. I also laid crayons out for anyone who simply wanted to color.

Both crafts worked well. The kids absolutely loved decorating the snowman, and it was definitely the crowd favorite. Cleanup was pretty easy, only a few glitter spills. Since we already had the glitter, glue, and tissue paper this program cost us $0!