Christmas Crafts for Kids: 13 Printable Crafts + a 24-Day Advent Chain (Printable + App)

Description

Thirteen crafts. Fifteen minutes each. And one that takes three weeks on purpose.

There is a stretch of December that nobody plans for. The decorations are up, school is out, it is too cold and too wet to send anybody outside, and there is still a week and a half of waiting left. By about four in the afternoon somebody is lying on the floor announcing that there is nothing to do, in a house that is visibly full of Christmas.

I have stood in that kitchen more times than I can count, scrolling for a craft on my phone with one hand while I stirred something with the other, and landing every time on a project that needed pipe cleaners, felt, and a trip to the store I was not about to make two days before Christmas.

So this is the opposite of that. Print it, get the scissors and the glue stick out of the drawer, and sit down at the table. That is the whole setup.

What it is

A 25-page printable pack of thirteen Christmas crafts for children, each one sized to about fifteen minutes at the kitchen table — plus an Advent chain that stretches across all twenty-four days because the waiting is the good part.

What it is not: a supply list. Everything here is paper, scissors, a glue stick and something to color with. The only exception is stated on the page where it matters — two of the crafts use split pins, and you will want to know that before you start rather than halfway through.

What is inside

• The Stable, a Piece at a Time — two cut sheets that build a stable with eleven figures, drawn by hand for this book. Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the animals, and the manger.
• The Advent Chain — twenty-four numbered strips. One comes off each evening, and the last one comes off on Christmas Eve.
• The Star for the Top — a folding star, and the one everybody wants to make twice.
• Ten more crafts to cut, color, build and wear — crowns, masks, a snowman, a gingerbread house, a tree and the rest, each with its pieces on a full-size page of its own so nothing prints too small to use.
• Instruction cards that tell you which pieces belong to which craft, what a grown-up needs to cut, and roughly how long to plan for.
• An age band on every single craft — Littles (2–4), Early Elementary (5–7), Big Kids (8–10), Tweens (11–12) — so you can hand each child the right one without guessing.

Printable and app — both, for the one price

Every product here comes in more than one form, because people are different. You get the 25-page printable to put on the table, and the app version free with it — on your phone, for the afternoon when nobody can decide. It picks a craft for you, remembers which ones you have already done, and counts the Advent chain down a day at a time. Add it to your home screen and it sits there like any other app. No login, nothing installed, nothing tracked.

Before and after

Before: the four-o’clock floor-lying, the phone-scrolling, the craft that needed felt.

After: a stack of printed pages in a folder on the counter, and a child who knows where it is.

“My children are different ages and one of them will be bored.”

That is why the age bands are on the crafts and not on the pack. The Tweens can take on the stable while the Littles tear a link off the chain and color a star, at the same table, on the same afternoon. Nobody is being given a project that is beneath them or beyond them.

Who is writing this

I am Robin — a mom of four and a grandmother, in Florida, and I have had a lot of Decembers with a lot of children in the house. Everything I make is the thing I actually needed at the time, built so it works on a Tuesday and not just on paper.

The details

$9. Instant download — the printable PDF, a Start Here page with your app link, and the app itself, all delivered the moment you buy. Digital products are final sale; if you have any trouble downloading, email me and I will get you sorted.

You don’t have to be a perfect mom. You just have to keep the fire going.