Xmas Crafts with kids

In The Netherlands the Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas on the 5th of December. 

Kids would get presents on their shoes or on the day itself Zwarte Piet ( Sint Nicholaas help) would deliver a sack of presents for kids.

For big kids who do not believe in Sinterklaas anymore, say beginning 10 year old, would participate in a name lottery system. One could get a name and he or she will play secret Santa and buy for the recipient a present anonymously. He himself will get a present from some other secret santa too. My kids school practice this and so do we at home.

 It is extra exciting when one would  hide the present in a "piñata" presentation together with a poem. These "piñata" are called "surprise" (pronounced as "surprees" as in "see") I wanted to call it surprise so much. I wonder why the word "verrassing" is not  used because that is a Dutch word for surprise. So everyone is calling it a surprees but it is spelt as surprise.

                                 Cute bunnies huh? Real Carrots!

Babbapapa?

My son's class decided on a free theme "surprises".  There are more boys in his class. Boys and their toys.

Meanwhile, my daughter's class has a "fairytale" theme. There are coincidently more girls in her class.

This is called a 'sprookjesboom" a fairytale tree. A famous tree in fact in Holland if you believe in fairytale. It could speak but here it can't, it just suffered a little transportation drama from home to school this morning, *snort*.

                               
                                              Guess this is Dumbo.

                      Ahhhh...The Money Tree...Now, that is Fairytale!

                                             A princess......

Meanwhile at home....I saw this idea of creating rainbow hues with colourful strings in a magazine from a local supermarket Albert Heijn.

  I love it and decided to copy the idea!

And my daughter came up with this idea which I thought is super cute! I secretly hope she is my secret santa.

On the 25th of December Dutch in Holland celebrate Christmas too. Double celebration, double preparations, double presents, double joy. (Double whammy mummy double broke) Presents, food, christmas cards....etc.

My daughter is participating in a program Day for Change in her school. Making her own Christmas Cards and sell them in a Xmas Market at school. I thought it would be cool to print photos of Christmas cookies we had baked before and just paste in on a card.

My daughter created some spring forms from these papers to create some spring suspensions under our cookie photos so the cookie "pops" right out at ya! LOL!

And we saw this idea at Martha Stewart and  thought "oh super cute" and kids would be able to make these. 

So we made some, using whatever papers we could find at home.

                         Now what is missing over here, is some snow .......