Three Kid-Friendly Ways to Make Paper Christmas Garlands

There’s nothing that says 'Traditional Christmas' like homemade ornaments or decorations. They’re not that hard to do – although you can get as elaborate as you want to, you really don’t have to – and when you get your kids or grandkids in the mix, doing something together adds another layer of tradition to a family Christmas.

1. Construction paper ring garlands are a good place to start. Even very young hands can hold a strip of pre-cut construction paper in place while older brother or sister uses a glue stick to keep it together to make the ring shape. Older kids don’t have to stick to construction paper but can branch out to other forms of paper to create their garlands (and there are a lot of choices these days in craft stores, such as gold- or silver-toned or patterned.)

2. If you could find really thin plastic sheets you could make ring garlands as a decoration for outside as well.

3. A more high-tech variation for older kids would be to use a word processing program to do Christmas phrases and then cut them into strips to form the rings for the garlands. It might take a couple of tries to get the right spacing for the strips, but once that’s done you can use different type styles for the phrases, different colors for the type, vary the size of the strips depending on the phrases (think of a garland with 2' wide rings that say 'Ho Ho Ho' or 'Joy'), make the strips a different color and the type white – there are a lot of interesting possibilities for creativity here.

The garlands themselves can either circle the tree or just hang down vertically – and they don’t have to be restricted to the tree. They can stretch across a doorway or the mantle or wherever they might be effective. And remember, if there’s a cat in the house make sure they don’t hang too close to kitty because when they move in the wind they tend to make a really effective cat-toy.

Written by Dianne Weller