We've been making Christmas cards for a couple of years now, helped by Usbourne for some great ideas - which we either follow or adapt.

You just need some fingers for these for the bodies and heads, and a paint brush or black pen for the rest.

Snowmen, penguins, angels are often featured – I think penguins are my fave, Mati prefers decorating the snowmen though. She used some glitter glue this time, which worked well.


We both do the finger painting – boredom can set it with Mati before me…but she loves drawing in the detail - arms, eyes, hats, scarves, etc, - and is way better than me at this.


So we use these for cards, present tags, etc,

I try and use brown paper as much as possible - and recycled – this year I was using card from packets of tights, for example.

Noa wanted to make cards to his best friends at his nursery. I was impressed with him patiently drawing, colouring, cutting, sticking and writing with very little help from me. He put them into envelops, wrote the names on top and took them to the nursery the following day. I thought it was very sweet of him.

This weekend we put up our Christmas tree and decorated it. Eilir wanted to decorate the room too (something I don't normally do much of because our living room is pretty colourful as it is), he also wanted to learn how to make chains of paper people - so I thought we could combine the two using newspaper (the black/white/grey would be a contrast to our shocking pink walls).

I first showed Eilir how a standard 'stick man' chain is made, folding the newspaper, drawing the design and then cutting out. Eilir then drew his own design with spiky hair that worked really well - on each he drew a different face, some with 'sticking out tongues'. Depending on how well we did the folding we'd get the occasional off one with bits missing, like one mysteriously was missing a head 'maybe he had a skiing accident...?' We then tried different Christmas themed shapes, like a snowman that Eilir drew - I did the cutting out while Eilir provided commentary 'Is it hard [cutting out the scarf], is it worth it...?' He then asked if he could do ‘corachod' (Welsh for elves), and proceeded to draw a practice elf. He commented 'Do you know what I think will be the hardest part? The curly shoes', and he was right - they were a devil to cut out (but definitely worth it)! We finished off with some weird and wonderful ones, including some fat birds (mine) and a man wearing a snowman suit (Eilir's).

Lo is Joseph in his class nativity play. Daddy bought a costume and took a picture of him trying it on for size. Using the laptop’s Paint programme, I whited-out the background of the photo and Lo diligently re-designed it, naturally including a Sidewinder snake. Rohan’s running in and out of the room, back and forth to Daddy and asking for something to eat.

Detangling hair and searching for the very un-festive but pernicious nit isn't great but does give time for some good discussion as to what the next day of Christmas should be.  G has some pretty tricky ideas inspired on the whole by Mr Maker, but until we work out the finer details, stencil cutting was something we could get our, I am glad to say nit free heads round this very night. G drew the subjects, I said I would cut out the shapes, but then the problems began about which bit you will see on the paper and which bit is left white from the stencil. Attempts at Father Christmas left us a bit frustrated as his detailed face became a big hole. A Christmas tree with surrounding presents worked much better, and G was pleased to discover that the angel cut out we thought we were throwing away could be used to make a halo-ish aura shape, next to it. Many angel pictures were then produced until the template was quite soggy and undefined round the edges....