The chance to relax, hunker down and enjoy some family time is one of the best things about the winter holidays.
Chilly days at home are the perfect opportunity to get stuck into some fun, creative crafts. And what better idea, given the family focus at this time of year, than creating some personalised family keepsakes and mementos?
We’ve got a range of ideas that are fun and packed with inspiring sensory experiences that will spark rich conversations with your little one. They’re also flexible, so you can involve any friends and family who drop by during the holidays!
1. Compile a family recipe book
Food, and the experience of cooking and eating meals together is a great bonding experience – even more so when it involves family recipes.
From introducing your little one to new foods, to talking about relatives and your shared heritage and culture, creating your own family recipe book can support your child’s language skills in lots of ways.
Dust down those handwritten recipes you inherited or do a shout-out in your family chat for suggestions. Give them pride of place in a special notebook or create a personalised folder.
Your child can get involved by drawing faces of the loved ones who have suggested recipes, or sketch some of the ingredients.
Chat through any interesting stories attached to each dish, saying things like, ‘This is daddy’s favourite meal’.
And set aside some time to try out the recipes – younger children love getting involved in supermarket shopping or finding ingredients at home, and the multisensory experience of being your little helper in the kitchen.
2. Make a family memory jar or box
Starting conversations about the people, places and events that are important to you and creating a memory jar or box is a brilliant way to practise talking about the past.
To get your collection underway, gather some things you’d like to include and talk to your little one about the memories they evoke.
Mix up the type and textures of your objects – and make them personal to your family.
It could be shells from an unforgettable beach trip, scraps of fabric from favourite old clothes, a handwritten joke, old jewellery or concert tickets. Anything at all that has some meaning to your family.
Ask your child about a person, place or event they’d like to celebrate and what might best represent it. You could go on treasure hunt around the house, enjoy a craft play session, make something new by hand, or pluck a photo from a family album.
Regularly remove objects from the jar and talk through each one and ask friends and family members to contribute to your collection too!
3. Create a family blanket or tablecloth
If you’re a confident crafter, try a patchwork blanket where each square creates a different topic of conversation with your little one, taking you back to a certain time or place.
You could repurpose some fabric from a treasured item of clothing, or find safe ways to get a preschooler involved in simple crochet, chunky knitting or sticking on pom poms and decorations to help develop their fine motor skills.
Ask family members to contribute their own squares too.
There are options if you're a crafting novice. Maybe customise a blanket with iron-on patches or badges that mean something to your family, or attach ribbons. Your little one can help you decide what to add and support with simple tasks.
Or you could create a family tablecloth or table runner for special mealtimes! Grab some child-friendly fabric paints and decorate the cloth with your handprints – you could add to them every year to show your little ones how much they’ve grown.
4. Celebrate your family tree
Making a family tree is a fantastic way to help your little one learn more about who they are and feel connected to relatives, including those they don’t see often or have passed away.
Sketch out a tree trunk and branches on large piece of paper, and together with your little one, use paints or stick on coloured paper to create texture and bring the bark to life.
Cut out leaf-shaped cards and add family members one by one. You could include a photo, or you and your child child can try drawing them. As you position each leaf, tell them about that person and talk about how you’re connected.
There are lots of ways to adapt this project to your own family. If you have a smaller family you could include friends and other important people in your tree.
Or if you’d like to focus on your immediate family, how about creating a framed peg doll family portrait? Decorate wooden clothing pegs to resemble each member of the family - pets too - and find a special spot for them. If you celebrate Christmas, they could live in the tree!
5. Make some personalised decorations
Do you have family decorations that have been around for years and bring back loads of memories as soon as they’re unwrapped?
Creating personalised decorations to add to the ones you’ve inherited is a great hands-on family activity.
Whether you celebrate Christmas, or want to mark another festival or holiday, or even notable dates like anniversaries, it’s a great way to look back at fun times together.
There are plenty of crafting options. Simple salt dough – made with flour, salt and warm water – is safe for little ones and perfect for little finger, hand or footprints. Or use your child's favourite toys or objects and potato stamps to leave interesting imprints in the dough.
You could help them cut and decorate fabric shapes with child-friendly paints and string together into a colourful garland. Or they could paint onto circles of craft wood and recreate their favourite memories of the year, perhaps a holiday, or a day with their best friend at nursery!
