Christmas Traditions: Nativity Craft

Wow! The week of Christmas! Are you thankful it’s finally here or, like me, are you kind of freaking out that it’s here already?

Yeah, it’s no secret that I still have a ton of things to do before Christmas Day — shopping, wrapping, baking, packing. But, despite my every growing list of things to do this week, I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you some of our traditions we do during the Christmas season.

Crafts

While my girls LOVE to do crafts and the holidays are a great time to break out those crafting items, we tend to not do the same crafts year after year. Granted, Abbi is only 5 and Zoe is only 2.5, so we haven’t done a ton of Christmas crafts yet.  But, what we have done are some little picture frames and ornaments.  This year Abbi has been so infatuated with Nativities and the Christmas Story and has been drawing tons of pictures of the Nativity scene.  So, I was very excited when I found this craft at KidsOnTheGrand.com.

The best part about this craft is that you can start out with just doing Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus and add different pieces (the Wise Men, the Shepherds, animals, the Angel) each year or you can be super ambitious and do the whole Nativity right away.  I think it will depend on how many kids you have (divvy up the different people/pieces) or how old your kids are.

KidsOnTheGrand.com has a great list of materials and instructions on their site for this craft, but I’ll give a few modifications that we made:

Supplies & Modifications:

• heavy duty glue
  * I used hot glue but I think a wood glue would work well, too.
• fabric
  * Any scraps of fabric will work.  We used felt.
• mini clay pots
  * We used little wood craft pots that we found at Michaels instead of the clay pots.  My girls are still young so I thought these might be a little safer in the long run.
• mini clay saucer
  * I also used a little wood box for the manger instead of a clay saucer.  Again, for the same “non-breakable” reason but I would suggest finding something that might lay more flat.  Ours is a little too tall.  I think I’ll be keeping my eye out for a better option the next time I’m at the craft store.
• paint
• paint brushes or sponges
• three wood beads (depending on the size of the pots you use, you want to make sure they are proportionate)
  *  Hint: buy the beads that have a flat spot on them.  This makes them easier to glue onto the pot.
• Sharpie markers — we used black and red
• straw
  * KidsOnTheGrand.com used Spanish Moss but I just used some tissue paper, thinking it would be less messy.
• pipe cleaner

KidsOnTheGrand.com does a great job of giving you a step by step guide to making this little Nativity so I would suggest heading over there for that part.

Abbi was very excited to put her own Nativity on the dresser in her room and was even more excited when I told her that next year we could make another piece to add to her collection!  My head is swirling with ideas on how to make them all a little different — glue on little presents (typically found at craft stores) for the Wise Men, make a little staff out of pipe cleaner for the Shepherd, of course little wings and a halo (pipe cleaner) for the angel. But she has me stumped on the animals.  I’ll have to really get my creative juices flowing for that one.

Oh, so here is our finished product for this year:

I avoided getting a close up shot of baby Jesus because we had a minor unfortunate accident with him.  The dog got ahold of the bead we were using for baby Jesus so his little face has some chew marks.  Oops!

I’d love to hear about what crafts you do with your kids at Christmas time.  Do you make crafts for around your house or for gifts? And, if you happen to try this craft, I’d love to hear how it turned out and how you made it your own!