Favorite Christmas Activities with a Preschooler

This Christmas season was so fun, magical, and exciting for my 3-year-old daughter. And it did seem to go by very quickly. Even though Covid-19 has kept us inside a bit too much this season, we tried our best to make the 2020 holiday season count!

To make the holiday even more fun for my preschooler, we tried various crafts and activities. The following five activities were favorites and we all enjoyed doing them.

1. Decorating the Christmas tree(s)

Decorating the Christmas tree with your toddler is a no brainer. It can be tons of fun, but some preparation may be needed to make it a safe activity. Depending on your child's age and fine motor skills, using small and breakable ornaments might not be the safest way to do this. What we did with my daughter is placing the tree on the soft carpet. This way if an easily breakable ornament falls, it is not automatically broken. You could also separate the ornaments into two containers - one with "safer" plastic, wooden, and fabric ornaments, and another one with the ones that can break easily, and give your toddler to decorate the tree with the ornaments that are safer. I did not separate the ornaments this year, since my daughter is a lot more capable of handling fragile objects.

Just like last year, we had two Christmas trees - a small one (the same height as my daughter) and a big one. The small one was a fake tree with integrated lights and it was the first to decorate. She got to pick all the fun ornaments from the boxes and did the entire tree all by herself. The big tree was a real Christmas tree. We picked it from a local business in Tuckahoe called Danny's Christmas Tree Stand (an outdoor stand) and we had tons of fun these. My daughter got to run around the Christmas trees' alleys and play hide and seek. Letting her decorate the first tree by herself was a good idea, not only because she had probably close to 2 hours of self-entertainment, but also because she let us have fun and decorate most of the second one.

2. DIY Christmas tree ornaments and garlands

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While we enjoyed decorating our Christmas trees a lot we decided to also make some ornaments and garlands. The first DIY ornament was a circle we cut out of paper with was decorated by my daughter by using a bunch of stickers that were given to her. For the second and third green paper ornaments, we cut out the circle shape from a green construction paper, and we used paper punches to punch shiny stars and flowers that were then glued onto the green circles (the shiny golden paper we got from some old boxes that we were planning on throwing away). We then made a small hole on top of all of them and we used some thread to hang them onto the tree.

We also made a bunch of these garlands by using construction paper. These are super basic and you can mix and match whatever colors you like and you only need colored paper (even old magazines pages could work great), scissors, and paper glue. You cut the paper into strips, make one circle by gluing the ends (you can also staple them). After that, you coil the second strip around the first and you keep going until you have the garland length you desire.

3. Baking with a toddler

Baking with a toddler is not as hard as scary as it might sound. There certainly will be a mess but there will also be fun.

Safety first, of course - only grown-ups turn on the oven, or touch knives, or mixers!

We love baking cupcakes with my daughter because she loves the whisk. Also, the batter for cupcakes is very thin and easy for her to mix. Because of that we generally do not use a mixer. She also enjoys putting in the ingredients by using the measuring cups as well as breaking the eggs (with my help). Occasionally she also tries to "help" by dumping extra flour or sugar in the batter, so I'm always on my toes where I leave the ingredients we are not using. While there is some downtime, she might get a snack to keep her occupied, or if we are doing cookies or decorating the tops of the cupcakes, she sometimes ends up snacking on the ingredients.

4. Sledding and making a snowman

Since we live in the Northeast of the U.S. we get some amount of snow during the winter. Last year we got some snow tubes from Amazon but we didn't get enough snow to use them because we had no snow. This year we had a good amount of snow during the holiday season and we spent a lovely time outside making snowmen and sledding.

What other activities did you enjoy with your kids during the holiday season? Tell us below!