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4 Easy Christmas Activities for Kids

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easy Christmas activities for kids
As the holidays approach, the pressure to make every day count becomes even more intense. You desperately want your kids to have beautiful holiday memories, but with all the busyness of homeschool, church, community events, family gatherings, and more, it can be hard to set aside time for those Christmas activities or to deal with the cleanup afterward, especially during certain seasons of family life. Here are four easy Christmas activities for kids that involve relatively little preparation and minimal mess.

Tour the Holiday Lights

If you have a holiday light show near your home, pile everyone into the car one night and drive over. Even if there’s no light show nearby, you can drive through local neighborhoods. There are always a few winter wonderlands at private homes where the owners have gone above and beyond. Add your favorite holiday playlist, and you’ve got a simple, fun, memory-making family Christmas activity.

Cookie Swap

Maybe you’re not keen on the idea of making Christmas cookies or treats from scratch this year. Maybe there’s been sickness in your family, you’ve recently had a new baby, or the toddlers just aren’t in a place to enjoy that sort of family Christmas activity. But you want your kids to experience and enjoy a variety of holiday treats—so why not organize a cookie swap with friends?

At a cookie swap, several families buy or make a few dozen Christmas cookies or special treats. Then everyone gathers to sample the goodies and trade bags or tins of the Christmas cookies to take home. To keep cleanup manageable, arrange to swap treats at a friend’s home or at church. You could even combine activities and go to an outdoor pavilion, perhaps near a skating rink or playground.

DIY Christmas Ornaments

If your kids are eager to participate in decorating for the holidays, let them craft a few ornaments for the tree. One easy way to do this is to purchase a bunch of durable plastic Christmas balls and different stickers (holiday-themed stickers, googly eyes, sequin stickers, etc.). The kids can plaster the ornaments with stickers, creating masterpieces fit for the tree—and there’s no glue involved!

Christmas Bingo

Want to keep your kids occupied while you’re driving or shopping? Use free printable games like Christmas bingo! Just print out the cards, give your kids some dot stickers, and let them conduct a visual scavenger hunt from the car seat, stroller, or shopping cart. They’ll have fun, and you’ll be free to focus on your destination or your shopping list.

In your season of life, making Christmas memorable might seem overwhelming. Just remember that activities for kids don’t have to be complex or Pinterest-worthy. The simplest family Christmas activity can yield some of the best bonding moments, learning experiences, and holiday charm.

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Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and the mom of two bright-eyed little ones. She credits her success in writing and her love of books to her own mom, who homeschooled three kids from pre-K through high school.

Celebrate America’s Past with Christmas Traditions

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We all enjoy different Christmas traditions, but one is a special delight for almost all Americans—Christmas cookies. Whether at church fellowships or at home on Christmas Eve, these holiday treats seem to be everywhere. But where do Christmas cookies come from? I confess that I hadn’t thought about the origin of this tradition until I was preparing to teach my second grader about the middle colonies in colonial America using BJU Press Heritage Studies.

The Middle Colonies

The middle colonies were uniquely diverse among the English colonies. New York and New Jersey were both settled by Dutch people. And Pennsylvania’s religious freedom attracted large numbers of Germans and Dutch even though it was founded by the English Quaker William Penn. The multicultural nature of these colonies had an impact on US history, but that fact can easily be lost on a seven-year-old. So BJU Press Heritage Studies 2 uses Christmas traditions to illustrate how these different nationalities contributed to America’s unique cultural identity.

(Image use) WP 12/2016

Our Christmas Traditions

As Heritage Studies 2 presents the story of the founding of the middle colonies, it discusses how the different nationalities brought different Christmas traditions with them. Germans brought Christmas trees and nativity scenes, and the English decorated their homes with evergreens, berries, and candles.

Then there were the Dutch. Since cooks in those days didn’t have a way of measuring the temperature in their ovens before baking cakes, they would take a small amount of batter and put it in the woodstove ovens to test the temperature. People in Holland called these test cakes koekje (KOOK-yieh), which means “little cake.” Eventually, they started making koekjes into people shapes that could be decorated after being baked. That was the basis for gingerbread men and other Christmas cookies we still enjoy every year.

As my daughter and I learn about the founding of these critical American colonies, it has been fun and insightful to see how BJU Press helps me use Christmas traditions to demonstrate how the nationalities in those early colonies influence our lives even today.

Find out more about how BJU Press textbooks support teaching history.