Ideas for Christmas activities/hygge that are free or very cheap

[user58486267489]

I thought I might start a thread with some ideas for things people can do (with or without children) that don't cost much/anything and that I loved as a child and now as an adult.

• Collecting pine cones and spraying them gold/silver
• Making mince pies/Christmas fairy cakes/ Christmas cake/ anything else at home
• We buy large packs of blank cards and always spend a very happy afternoon (or two afternoons!) making Christmas cards for friends, teachers etc. We use the same Christmas ink stamps that I used as a child (even the ink pads are still ok!). My children started to really enjoy this when they were about 7 - they liked it when they were younger but it didn't take quite so much time up! Now they're a bit older they love to take time to make/draw a special card for all their significant adults and we listen to Christmas music or an audiobook while we work (I make cards too!).
• Making paper chains - we stick on a film and start a production line. The children love this and I'm happy for them to decorate their bedrooms with tons of paper chains!
• Christmas films... We don't have any subscription services but we do have the ability to "record" programmes from the tv onto our box. So I go though the TV listings near Christmas and record any films that I think we might like. I never, and I do mean never, buy films/dvd's etc. There is masses on normal TV and lots of programmes we all now enjoy too!
• I make a treasure trail for our village with things for the children to tick off - some are specific to our village, some are just random things that I assume we might spot - eg dog being walked, star on top of a tree, person wearing wellies etc. They get a chocolate coin for every item they find!
• Nativity play/crib service - children always very keen to take part in our village church nativity and/or crib service. It's also something I loved when I was a child - the sense of the whole community coming together working out parts, costumes, lighting, music etc (it was always really very simple - nothing fancy but so lovely).
• Care home - we normally go and visit a care home we have a connection with and join in with carols/general helping out. If you/your child is involved with brownies/cubs etc - please do consider asking a local care home if they're like you to come and sing carols or something!
• Homeless bags - we fill spare party bags with things that a homeless person might appreciate - new socks, new toothbrush, pack of sweets, can of coke etc. This was very much led by my oldest child and it's the children who give them out. I have had chats with them about people not always being appreciative etc/feeling really sad, tired etc but so far they have only ever had a good response!
• I take both my children shopping on their own to choose and buy a present for their sibling. Normally £5-£10 and it's their own pocket money. They really LOVE choosing and wrapping something themselves.
• Garden centre - our local garden centre has lots of animatronic animals, great displays etc. I am a sucker for a Christmas garden centre trip :-)
• Instead of a cinema trip with snacks etc that would easily cost £40 including parking, even with cheapish tickets, we have movie nights at home with homemade popcorn, hot chocolate etc. At Christmas we turn off all the lights and just have the tree lights on and we all snuggle under throws. It's so lovely and sometimes we just watch a few episodes of a favourite programme instead. The key for this is no phones etc (which is hard for me!) and feeling like we're all cosy together and enjoying something together.
• Gingerbread houses, Christmas biscuits and chocolate logs - I often invite a few friends and let the children decorate an Ikea gingerbread house. They love it and they're very cheap to buy. Last year we got a normal chocolate swiss roll from Tesco, melted some chocolate and the children really enjoyed making a chocolate log with insane decorations. (I make a proper buche du noel too another time!). Ditto Christmas biscuits - last year we decorated them as melting snowmen (copied the biscuits we saw in Pret!). Lots of fun.
• Decorating - we go for a walk about a week before Christmas and cut holly and other green things from friend's gardens (with permission) and then use this to decorate the house. It's free (!), looks and smells lovely and the children love choosing what to cut and using the secateurs.
• Jigsaws - my idea of heaven. Big Jigsaw to do while the children watch something on tv/play/"help" me with the jigsaw/listen to an audiobook. BLISS.

Ok, that's a Christmas ESSAY!! I hope someone finds some of it vaguely helpful. I think, for me, the focus is on spending time together enjoying quite basic activities but the joy of it really is in being together. We're not The Waltons and we do have plenty of arguments and tantrums just like everyone else.

We don't have a big extended family which is one reason why I like to join forces with other friends with children sometimes to bolster the numbers!

We also do things that are expensive at Christmas but I am cutting back because I know that actually, my children are just as happy playing a long game of monopoly with Pringles and lemonade as they are watching The Nutcracker!

As a child, Christmas was all about feeling safe, cosy and being with my parents. I'm trying my best to make it as simple and lovely as that really.

All other ideas MORE than welcome!

Some of our favourites are as follows:

I sneakily decorate the dollhouses (we have Lanka kade and a few other bits for the wooden one and playmobil decorations for the playmobil house). The official story is the dolls do it, suspect ds knows better but he keeps quiet. I try and add something each year, last year it was strings of battery lights. This year it's going to be snowmen for their gardens.

We always decorate a gingerbread house (has to be the Hansel and Gretel one from Lidl which is cheap and sturdy). Dr Oetker's edible glue works a treat for holding gingerbread houses up.

We have a box of Christmas books which comes out on the 1st. Every night we read a bit of the Enid Blyton Christmas book which talks about the various traditions and their origins. My mum did the same with me and I've still got my copy. When they bring in holly from the garden, we do the same etc.

Every year we make Christmas place markers for the table. The 1st year it was little wooden trees from Baker Ross to decorate but as they've got older, we've got more elaborate. This year they want to make snowmen in glass jars and I think we'll use air drying clay plus recycled jars. They then get reused as decorations the following year.

We make jars of dried apple slices dipped in chocolate for Christmas Eve snacks. I use a dehydrator but the oven would work. We also have to make melting snowman cookies for Santa and mincepies for everyone else.

We go for walk in the wood at dusk bleeding into dark with a torch. It's the right blend of creepy and quiet. Ds likes to tell ghost stories and on at least one occasion we've ended up running back to the car having spooked ourselves.

My favourite though is our picnic by the Christmas tree lit by fire and candles plus the tree lights. Pine scented candles, maybe Christmas music and lots of picnic food followed by a couple of Christmas stories. My grandmother would always serve our Christmas Eve meal like this when we arrived at her house, tired from our journey across Europe and it was my favourite part. My kids love it too and would eat every meal in December like this if we let them.

We have decorated a gingerbread house every year for years. We did them as kids and then my DW started doing them again with my younger cousin when I first met her. Only COVID stopped play the last 2 years. We’ve both since had little ones, so can’t wait to keep on doing them with our kids now too as they get older.

Since our twins were born as well we read them The Night Before Christmas and put out a mince pie for Santa, as well as carrots for the reindeer.

Looking forward to trying some of these lovely ideas, thank you.

Thank you all for such lovely ideas. Fab thread.

ColeslawSandwich, word mining is where you get a word or phrase and see how many other words you can make from those letters. So from Merry Christmas you can find

Marry
Mast
Star
Mist
Rest
Stair
Car
Cars
Starry
Meat
Cheat
Chest
At
The
As
Are
Is
It
Arm

.....

And loads more.
In lots of houses, that might be an activity to do in the daytime, but in our house, it was a great bedtime activity as DD finds it hard to slow her brain down to get to sleep so focussing on 1 thing that needed attention was good. It also meant we read bedtime stories until she was about 9/10 as that helped too (and moved from us reading to listening to audiobooks and then on to podcasts suitable for her - she loves " Cabin Pressure" from radio 4! 🤣)

Glass jars painted with anything eg nail polish, poster paint, plus a tea light. White blobs for falling snow or a red berries look surprisingly good!

Fold and cut out geometric-shaped white paper snowflakes to stick to the windows.

Christmas tree shaped biscuit cutter, green icing, silver balls, sweets etc. If you have a gingerbread house this can be a forest around it.

Make a wreath with bits of evergreen plus ribbon, ivy, battery fairy lights. You can use wire coat hangers for the frame

If Christmas Eve dinner or another meal is special, children make place cards.

Children make tiny decorations for sylvanians/ playmobil house.

Make or buy brownies/rocky road, stack them haphazardly and sprinkle with icing sugar to create a rugged snow scene, to which can be added tiny plastic toy deer, pine trees, lego minifigures.

Salt dough tree decorations. Use a star biscuit cutter, make a hole for ribbon, then decorate with paint or glitter.

Finally sounds so naff but if you don't have a fireplace the Netflix fires are actually surprisingly lovely to have crackling in the background while someone is reading a ghost story.

We do an Xmas eve walk down to the beach and marina. Tires DS's out and is lovely and cold.

Xmas bath bomb and hot chocs

Party tea on disposable Xmas plates for Xmas eve tea

Boys pick one bauble each for the tree each year

Christmas disco

On November 30th boys go to bed. I put the decorations up whilst they're asleep so on 1st December they come down and everything is magical.

@BiddyPop thanks, I’d never heard it called that.

Oh yes, we love the Netflix fireplaces!!

Thank you for starting this thread. I LOVE Christmas and now have 3 DC to share some of these fun activities with :)

Love this thread, I've got a lovely warm feeling.

Going to go back through it and note down my favourites and add some of my own.

They have fireplace and festive scenes on Sky box too. I actually feel warmer when the fireplace one is on 🤷🏻‍♀️😂

We have a tradition that one of the weekends in the run up to Christmas we have family round to our house for party food and as many Christmas film favourites we can fit in (Muppets being the one that HAS to be watched.) You don't necessarily have to have party food, could be nibbles, milled wine, cups of tea etc whatever suits budget. The main thing is everyone is together enjoying old family favourites.

Do so many of these, mine are practically grown up but still love a few of these.
The only ones I haven't seen yet are a Christmas breakfast/brunch one weekend (cousins stay over) and we get a few Christmassy ideas from Pinterest and lay the table, make it look cute. Decorate the tree together with a cocktail (alcoholic or not)
Put the Xmas duvets on beds, had them for years!
We had fun one year on a charity shop challenge, 'best' item for £2 kind of thing. Sometimes we buy nonsense, some find a true bargain or just something they need but it's all for a good cause and lots of healthy discussions about who has won.

This thread is gorgeous!

I literally want to move in with all of you! Such lovely Christmas traditions :)

A word of warning for those of you with tiny children. We have done these for years and my DC are teenagers and still love many of the activities. But it's really hard to fit it all in between work and nursery and school so have a good selection of quick and easy activities, we would watch The Snowman or Father Christmas on busy days. And while pomanders and paperchains etc are very successful now (my youngest is 10), when they were little it was loads of work.

Some more activities:
Snowball fight (it rarely snows in December so we have fake snowballs. This is one of their favourite activities)
Candlelit bath (they loved this when they were little and shared a bath)
Santa Run (these happen all over the country and while not free to take part, does raise money for charity)
Candy cane hunt (similar to an Easter Egg hunt but inside and with candy canes)
Make a tree decoration. We have pom pom robins, saltdough stars, lots of Hanna bead decorations, origami decorations, etc etc
Selfie scavenger hunt (for the teenagers)
Chrismas Carol Anagrams
Magic Crystal Christmas Tree (these kits cost ~£10 but there are instruction on DIY online)

OP, your Christmas activities are adorable. Can I come and stay this Christmas

@MaisyMoo2022 sure! But seems there are lots of people who have even more fabulous ideas! SO enjoying reading everyone’s posts!

Can I live in your home please?!

I love this soooo much 😍

I've done a few of yours OP, but very lovely ideas.

At the beginning of December on one of my days off I prepare a basket with a selection of Christmas cards, we have loads from previous years so it's a mixture. I pop in gel pens, Christmas stampers and stickers and it's set out on the kitchen table when they come home from school with a festive snack and Christmas music.

Sadly they're getting older so I don't know if they'll want to do it for classmates anymore but I'm hoping they might do it for the Nanas and aunties and uncles.

We always do paper chains too

Im watching hallmark Christmas films from the end of September 😂

Christmas baguettes from our local sandwich shop

I insist that everyone watches The Snowman

We do at least four of the Christmas shoeboxes, the kids enjoy this

Hi sorry for late reply.

Yes absolutely you can. We are quite an outdoor family and do this sort of stuff all the time. I would usually say it's worth spending a bit more money on a decent quality food flask but honestly our one from Aldi / Lidl can't remember which one is amazing. The trick is to preheat the flask with boiling water and a lid on I do this while I'm cooking the food. Make sure the food is piping hot then put in flask obviously tip water out first. The fuller the flask the longer it will stay warm.

Sausages are the kids favourite but we've also done chilli, tinned beans and sausage, soup, pata and pesto, noodles the instant kind I put the noodles seasoning sachet and a handful of defrosted peas or mixed veg in there add some boiling water (trial and error to get amount right) then a bit later on its ready to eat. My toddler and I go to forest school each week and we make porridge and put it in the flask and eat when we get there before it starts. I would say things keep warm for up to 4 hours in ours.

Hope that helps!

@ColmanFlamingo
”I insist that everyone watches The Snowman“ - that’s the sort of family bossiness I can get on board with 😂

@Decafflatteplease super helpful, thank you!

@user58486267489
It's essential viewing! 😂 (along with many others!)

If you can't be faffed with making salt dough, or don't have time, you can use cheap white sliced bread to do the same thing. Cut out with biscuit cutters, not forgetting a hole for hanging. Then simply leave on a windowsill to go stale. Once hard, they can be painted and beglittered to your heart's content. We made a batch when the offspring were little and they lasted really well.

Find a local am dram panto, we took our boys to one in a church hall when they were small, as much fun as a full theatre production but so much cheaper. Plus they didn't need to be right at the front to get some of the thrown sweets.

I insist that everyone watches The Snowman

Yes !

DD 9who is 20) and I always watch it , still leaves a huge ache in the heart at the end .
One year Channel 4 didn't show it till Boxing Day .
I mean what's the point It's a Christmas Eve show !