Idea Share and Other Acitivites

I love Christmas. SO much. It combines fun traditions and activities with spiritual and uplifting experiences, resulting in one incredible season.

Wanting Jade to understand that Christ's birth is the reason we celebrate Christmas, we have been using different resources to tell the nativity story each FHE this month and throughout the week. She especially likes reading the book to the left and using a small nativity set my mom gave us a few years ago to match the characters. Some other resources we've used are the Nursery's and Sunbeam's Christmas lessons. Tonight I used a combination of the CTR lesson, stories from the friend, and the talk by Elder Eyring to focus on gifts for the Savior (the First Presidency Christmas Devotional is a must see/read this season if you haven't already). For Christmas Eve, in addition to talking about the birth of Christ again, I want to teach Jade about the symbols we use at Christmas time. I'm planning to use the new song that was printed in the Friend this month: Our Christmas Story Tree (it's perfect for what I want to do! listen to the song and watch a video here; I promise it's worth the time) and snippets from this activity book. I'm posting these links in hopes someone will find them helpful. What are some of the resources you have used or will be using? I would love more ideas!

For more secular Christmas crafts and activities, I used a few sites I found searching the ultimate source: google. I was pleased to come across crafts simple enough for Jadyn's young age (with a little help from mom here and there), all using simple supplies we already had on hand. I thought I would share just in case anyone is wanting some ideas for their little ones. In turn, I would love it if you shared your fun activities and resources with me too!

Cone Santa, toilet paper tube snowman
Hand and footprint reindeer (we didn't have any brown paper, so I just had her paint it.)
She also enjoyed Christmas coloring pages and making an angel out of circles and triangles. Some others I still want to do with her: Santa plate and handy wreaths.

In addition to our at-home activities, we've had a few others to attend. Our branch Christmas party, complete with photo booth.
Decorating Christmas cookies with cute little Nora. I love this picture so much. I tried to get Nora to smile, but her half smile/distractedness coupled with the smeared candy slobber resulted in her looking like she was about to puke. Hilarious. Isn't Nora a doll?! I learned something this day. I brought food coloring, decorating bags, tips and more, but soon realized the only things 2/3 year olds are really capable of doing are sticking candy on the cookie and eating any treat in sight. Including sucking frosting out of said decorating bags. Decorating gingerbread graham cracker houses with the Wrights. Apparently Matt's family has a tradition to make an entire town made out of gingerbread each year. Impressive. I really thought Jade would have fun decorating one, so we combined forces and made it happen.
Another enlightening experience. Jadyn was much MUCH more interested in eating the candy as opposed to actually putting it on the simple house I crafted for her. By the time she was done, the roof had collapsed and only frosting residue remained where candy had once been. We decided our little town is not too far off from Hong Kong: nice buildings, shacks, and unfinished structures all in the same neighborhood. BTW Cody's is unfinished because he was struuuggling with cutting the graham crackers and ran out of time.
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed myself with this little project. I'm pretty sure the last time I decorated a g-house was in grade school. This was so much fun!