Posted in Advent, Christmas

(since we aren't getting anything else done today, I thought I'd get a little blogging in...these pictures are a few days old.)

Here is a craft that the girls enjoyed doing...and it uses up old Christmas cards! This idea actually could fill up a whole day...or more! I have saved Christmas cards from years past and have probably a hundred in a bag. I pulled those out yesterday and we put them all out on the floor and just looked at them for awhile, noticing differences, colors, etc. Then I told the girls to find all the cards that had a part of the Bible story on it. This was good for me to see! They knew the pictures of Santa, reindeer, wreaths, etc, were not from the actual Christmas story. They pulled out all the cards that had the nativity scene on it, then from those, we also looked at differences. Some had just wisemen, some had just Mary and baby, some had the stable and lots of animals. The girls really enjoyed looking at all these cards!

Then, I told them to pick a few favorite nativity pictures and we cut out the picture part. Then, we glued them onto some cardstock and put a "stable" around the picture using wooden craft sticks. These turned out pretty cute!

Well, the girls did not want to be finished cutting up the Christmas cards! So, I glued the sticks onto a piece of paper for them and told them to glue on a nativity any way they wanted to. Emily found a card she liked and glued the whole scene into her stable. Hannah (not surprisingly) cut out each individual character from lots of different cards and glued them into her stable. They turned out pretty cute too! And the girls really enjoyed this!

Hannah's nativity scene

Emily's nativity scene