DIY Holiday Treats and Gifts You Can Make with Your Kids

By Emily Bradbury

kids making treats and crafts

Christmas is a wonderfully exciting time for children, and as a parent gives you plenty of opportunities to do fun and affordable activities together and bond as a family. Creating gifts for your friends and family means a chance to show your children the importance of thinking of others, as well as creating special, thoughtful gifts for your loved ones that show just how much you care.

This is an especially good idea if you are on a tight budget, but also gives you a great excuse to put on the Christmas music, light a fire and enjoy this festive time of year with your kids doing something fun and creative together.

Edible Gifts

Christmas Cookies: Cookies are easy and fun to make with your kids, and they are sure to want to get involved. To make them seasonal try your usual cookie recipe with the addition of nutmeg or cinnamon, or making gingerbread men instead. You can use cookie cutters for Christmassy shapes, which you can later add detail to with icing.

Icing your cookies is the fun part; you could try making them quite intricate or letting your children loose with sparkly and colorful edible toppings. Either way, you’re all sure to have a lot of fun and make lots of mess!

Gingerbread Men Recipe

gingerbread cookies

American Cuisine

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 egg
4 tablespoons golden syrup/honey
175g/6oz brown sugar
350g/12oz plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
125g/4.5 oz butter

2 dozen cookies

10-15 minutes

Bake 350 degrees

Cost is about .20 cookie

Directions

1. Mix together the bicarbonate of soda, ginger, cinnamon and flour. Add to a food processor with butter and blend until it resembles breadcrumbs, then stir in the sugar

2. Beat together the syrup and egg before adding to the food processor, then pulse until it clumps together. Knead until smooth then put in the fridge for 15 minutes.

3. Roll out the dough to a 0.5cm thickness, then use a cutter to get the gingerbread man shape

4. Put in the oven, spaced out on a baking tray, for 12-15 minutes at 180C/350F/Gas

5. Leave to cool before you begin decorating!

Chutneys

There are all sorts of tasty chutneys and marmalades you can make with a little help from your kids that are perfect for Christmas gifts. A lot of the recipes may be a little time consuming or fiddly for small children to join in with, but you could certainly make them with teenagers, or just decorate the jars with your children afterwards.

My personal favourite options are mango chutney, which is a perfect addition to leftover turkey sandwiches, and red onion marmalade, which is great with cheese and crackers or bread. Both are fairly straight forward, with the time consuming bits just cutting up and preparing your ingredients. When made and jarred, the fun part is decorating your jars.

You can add pretty fabric to the top, seasonal ribbon and tags describing the jar’s contents.

Mango Chutney

chutney mango

American Cuisine

Ingredients:

4 large mangoes
4 garlic cloves
2 baking apples
1 tablespoon mustard powder
1 tablesppon cayenne pepper
1 pint white wine vinegar
1 tablespoonn grated ginger
2 cups sugar

Directions:

1. Peel, stone and slice the mangoes

2. Put the slices in a bowl and sprinkle with salt, leaving in the fridge overnight

3. In the morning drain and rinse the fruit

4. Put the garlic, apples, mustard, ginger, vinegar, cayenne pepper and sugar in a pan over a low heat, until sugar is dissolved.

5. Bring the mixture to the boil and add the mangoes

6. Simmer for 30 mins until the chutney is syrupy

7. Spoon into sterilised jars and seal

Christmas Crafts - Affordable Christmas Gifts

Candy Cane Mice

This is a really easy yet cute gift for your children to make for their friends, from a Martha Stewart guide. You just need some felt in a variety of colors, and a bag of candy canes (as well as supplies like glue and scissors).

By using Martha Stewart’s downloadable template you can cut the felt to size, and easily assemble the mouse shape. The candy cane sits inside the small felt mouse.

Directions:

1. Enlarge the mice template provided on Martha Stewart’s website to 150%

2. Cut the templates out, then trace around onto the felt – mixing up colors for different body parts as you wish

3. Make slits in the body to attach ears and slot in the candy cane tail

4. Slip ears through the slits at the front, then slide candy cane through the body slits, tucking the end under the back ear piece.

Christmas Crackers and Wrapper

diy christmas crackers

This is something I did with my mother as a child on the weeks running up to Christmas; she would choose a special gift for each family member that was going to eat with us on Christmas day, and wrap them up in tissue paper first so I wouldn’t know what each person’s present was.

It’s important of course to choose a gift that is small enough to fit inside a cracker!

Supplies needed:

A small gift, wrapped in tissue paper
A toilet roll tube
Ribbon
Decorative paper
Cracker snaps
Anything additional you would like to use for decoration
Scissors and glue

Directions:

Assembling and decorating the crackers is simple to do:

1. The present needs to be wrapped in tissue paper.

2. Place inside the toilet paper tube

3. Wrap in Decorative paper and decorate


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