Home-made Christmas Tree Decorations

When I was little, my aunt and I made simple Christmas tree decorations ourselves. The idea is to have Aina create her own tree decorations. But she’s still too small, so we had to help her with the drawing, cutting and glueing.

We starts with the supplies:

• A stack of card paper, left-over from Aina’s flash card that we made when she was 2 months old…


• Black waterproof marker


• Coloring pens


• A very thin red ribbon


• Glue and scissors (not pictured)

So, first, fold the card paper in the middle, so we have it folded like a book. Then Ari starts to draw on one side. We drew many things like Santa Clause, snowman, Christmas tree, bells, mistletoes, star… etc. If you don't like to draw, just find pictures you like from coloring books, make a photocopy of it and glue it to the card paper. Or scan and print it on the card paper. 

We then give the finished drawing to Aina and let her color it. She’s not very good in coloring yet, and it keeps going off the line and all. But that’s okay… we’re planning to keep these kind of things as mementoes for later. So we think the imperfection is actually rather cute :)

After Aina finishes coloring, I cut the drawing along with the folded paper underneath it. So, at the end, I have two pieces of the same shape. These two pieces will be glued together, back-to-back.

Then, I cut the ribbon to about 20cm in length or enough to make a loop for hanging. Smear the glue on one side of the cut piece, then place the cut ribbon on the top of the piece in a loop form. After that, place the other cut piece on top before the glue dries. So now i can hang the snowman, Christmas tree or whatever you make on the tree.

But since the other side of the hanging decoration is still empty, we give it back to Ari to draw the mirror image of whatever on the other side.

And let Aina color it as well…

Then, we let her hang it on the tree. Tonight, we only finished three ornaments… Aina ran out of steam by the time we’re doing the fourth one. So, we probably continue making them tomorrow and the next day.

Next year, we're hoping to make the beads ourselves, too.