Christmas Crafts for Kids

Every December the same question comes round, and the honest answer is that the best Christmas crafts for kids are the ones you can start without a shopping trip. Everything in this collection uses flour, paper plates, lolly sticks or a hand — things already in the house on the day you need them.

These four are the ones that survived. We keep the crafts for kids that get asked for twice and quietly drop the rest, and these come back out of the box every year: salt dough ornaments that go on the tree until they chip, handprint cards that relatives keep for fifteen years, a paper plate wreath that goes straight on the door, and popsicle stick trees small enough to make four in a row.

They are sorted roughly by how long they take. If you want easy Christmas crafts for kids for a tired weekday, start at the bottom with the popsicle sticks — ten minutes, three sticks, no cutting. If you have a free morning, the salt dough is worth the three-hour bake, because it is the only one here that is still around in a decade.

Ages three to eight throughout, with notes on each for making it simpler or harder. And if you are planning Christmas activities for kids across the whole month rather than a single afternoon, spread them out: one big messy one at the start, the small kids Christmas crafts held back for the days when nobody has the energy for anything else.