Our Family trip to see Santa

Just like most families around this time of the year we get our kids and we take the annual trip to go have our kids sit on Santa’s lap. Usually every year we take Jesse to see the Santa at our local Cabela’s. They have the best background behind Santa while the children and the parents go sit in Santa’s sleigh with Santa and they have a staff member take a photo. The best part was the photos with santa were free and the whole family was able to sit in the sleigh for the picture.

 unfortunately we were slightly pressed for time and was not able to meet their Santa schedule. So Sunday night my family and my brother who we invite to go everywhere with us were taking our annually drive through The Enchantment in the Park and low and behold Santa was there. So we braved the extremely strong winds that evening and made our way to Santa’s little village so that our son could go sit on Santa’s Lap. Obviously this was not the set up like Cabela’s, however it was done very nicely and had a lot of activities the whole family could enjoy which was great!  There was an area set up outside of Santa’s house that had a bunch of wooden cutout that you could stick your head in for photo ops. slides for the kids to go down and a few other lite up decorations. They even had an elf greeting people and a Mrs. Clause where the children could sit on her lap while they waited to sit on Santa’s lap. With all these Extras who could go wrong. We did have to bring our own camera for the pictures with Santa but my camera is attached to me at the hip so I had no worries in that department. All in all it turned out to be a very nice evening despite the strong winds and the cold weather, but I do live in Wisconsin so I really can’t expect less. Here are some of the pictures from our night with Santa

 

Merry Christmas to your family from ours!

Santa’s Elves Entrance

This was such a fun project to work on with my little boy. He is still in the age where anything that lights up or is special is like magic. I was trying to find something for us to do that was different from making decorations for the tree or the walls. I had a big box left over from when we bought our carpet cleaner and decided to use it instead of sending out to the recycling bin. This project ended up looking so nice that we are using as a center piece in our house layout. When we host Christmas this year the food table will be set up near the elves door way and north pole sign. There are also some snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, and the entire house is lit up in blue LED’s. Anyway the kids will love creating this project and it will remain loads of fun for them while it’s on display. It will also make for a great conversation piece with all your friends and family. You can really decorate the house with whatever material you like and design it so that it fits your Christmas Theme. I worked with some materials that I had extras from other projects.

 

Supplies I Used:

• 1 big box
• 8 sheets of plain red tissue paper
• 2 sheets of red designed tissue paper
• 4 sheets of white tissue paper
• Glitter
• 1 half piece of white construction paper
• Christmas Lights

 

Instructions:

1. Take your box and stand it so it’s the tall way.
2. Then take a scissors and cut out your door, just make sure you don’t cut it all the way off.
3. Then cut out the bottom of the box.
4. Take your roof paper and glue that on to the top of the box.
5. Then glue on the siding
6. The next step is to glue on the paper for the door.
7. With the card board that you cut off earlier cut a strip and fold it a few times to make a square for the chimney and glue that on top of the roof paper
8. Take a smaller strip of card board for the door knob and brush a coat of glue on it
9. glitter your door knob and then set aside to dry.
10. Then with your half sheet of paper make your sign for the door. Ours read Santa’s Elves Only, However yours can say whatever you would like it to say.
11. I decorated our sign with glitter also
12. Then glue on your door handle after its done drying
13. The last step is to finish adding whatever little touches you would like to add to the house. For instance, I added Christmas Tree Lights. If you would like the pattern and instructions for the lights please leave a message for me in the comments section of this post. Thank you

Thats It. Jesse loves this house and plays with it everyday. I really liked the way it turned out and I would be really excited to see how your Santa’s Elves Entrance turns out!!

 

Paper Santa

This is another one of those Christmas classic crafting ideas. However believe it or not I just so happen to not have paper plates in the house when I decided to start this project, so we improvised. My little one really enjoyed this project but once again, we learned a valuable lesson about leaving things to dry where the big bad kitty would find it funny to attack the tip of Santa’s hat and completely tore off the first hat so I just cut it down and replaced it with another. This time to make sure I set it somewhere the cat could not destroy it while it was drying. Another thing that some might find a little funny is if you are wondering about why santa looks SHOCKED well this santa is sitting right above where my son’s time out chair is and Santa is just shocked that someone would have to sit in the naughty chair.  No really I was just really bad at trying to draw a mouth that’s just the end result. HAHA

Well let’s get started.

Supplies Needed:

• I used a peach colored piece of paper but you can go the classic way and use a paper plate too.
• 1-2 sheets of white paper
• 1 sheet of red paper
• Glue
• Scissors
• Cotton balls (20-40)
• black marker

Instructions:

1. First I traced a large circle out of the peach paper of grab a paper plate.
2. On the white paper you will need to draw a beard, a mustache, 2 ovals for the eyes, and a rectangle that is the width of the paper and about 1 to 1 1/4 inch high for the brim of Santa’s hat.
3. On the red piece of paper draw the shape of a santa hat and a smaller red over for Santa’s Lips.
4. Now that you are done drawing all your objects its time to cut them out.
5. The next step is to take your peach circle or paper plate and lay that down first.
6. Then Lay down they red hat piece
7. Next lay down the white beard piece make sure that everything lines up together fairly nicely width wise and make sure the beard and the hat overlap your circle by about a half-inch to an inch but make sure you leave enough space for the face to fit in there properly.
8. After you lined everything up its time to secure them to the circle with your glue.
9. After you glue the hat and beard on lay the eye pieces down, the red oval for the lips, and then the mustache. Try and tuck the very bottom of the red oval under the edge of the beard. Just make sure the lips arent overlapping on top of the beard. Also  make sure the mustache is lined up with where the beard ends on the face and is just above the top of the red oval or slightly overlapping it.
10. Then secure them in place.
11. After you do that you will take your white rectangle piece and lay it so that it’s just covering the very top of the eyes and overlaps the red hat.
12. Next take your black marker and draw in the eye balls, draw a nose, and draw the rest of the lips. (I am not very artistic when it comes to drawing facial features as you could see from the above picture.)
13. When you are done securing all your pieces in place it is then time for the fun part, Gluing on the cotton balls.
14. Glue the cotton balls onto the beard first starting with an outline around the edge and work your way into the middle
15. Then glue your cotton balls onto the mustache making sure you cover the whole mustache.
16. After that glue more cotton balls onto the white rectangle for the brim of Santa’s hat.
17. Last but not least glue one or two cotton balls onto the tip of Santa’s hat.

All Done!

Please comment back and remember to come back and share your Classic Paper Santa Projects