Handmade Christmas Tree Crafts: The Best Homemade Christmas Decorating Ideas

The period of New Year's and Christmas holidays is a magical time that we want to spend with family and close friends. People go to great lengths to create a special holiday atmosphere. And not the least role in a sense of anticipation of a miracle is played by decorating your home or apartment.

Fairy-tale winter decorations do not need any special and expensive materials. Everything you need for your own Christmas crafts can be found at home. And the resulting decorations and toys can be a good gift for friends and family.

Children especially enjoy making handicrafts. Helping to prepare for the upcoming holidays especially brings together different generations in the family.

Handmade crafts for Christmas can be divided into several categories:

Christmas tree toys;
wreaths;
interior decorations (garlands, decorative Christmas trees, etc.)
candles;
Christmas cakes.

Christmas tree toys

The process of making a variety of Christmas decorations can be described endlessly. Many of them can easily be made with our own hands.

Very beautiful toys are made from dough, resembling white clay. For its preparation, you will need a glass of baking soda, half a cup of cornstarch and three-quarters of a cup of warm water.

All components are mixed in a saucepan and heated over medium heat with continuous stirring. When the mixture begins to fall off the walls, cool the dough and knead it by hand. The ready dough is rolled out into a layer about 0.5 cm thick and with the help of cookie cutters cut out figures.

In each toy you need to make holes for a string or ribbon. Toys can be decorated with beads, sequins or rhinestones. Then the decorations are transferred to a baking tray to dry. The peculiarity of such dough is that it remains white after drying.

An excellent material for making toys are cinnamon sticks. For example, you can glue pieces of ribbon on them in the form of a Christmas tree and decorate the resulting toy with glitter or buttons.

From several corks, colored pipe cleaners, wire, beads and small pompoms you can make a cheerful reindeer. The eyes and nose are glued to the cork.

The scrubbers are twisted into horns and inserted into the slit on the cork. Pieces of wire connect the cork head to the cork torso and are inserted into the torso, becoming the legs. The hooves are made of beads.

Christmas wreaths

All over the world, it is very popular to decorate the entrance door with a wreath. To make such a wreath, you need a frame, woven from wire or long flexible branches. A frame is wreathed with fir branches (natural or artificial), or green tinsel. Then the wreath is decorated with Christmas decorations.

Classical "Christmas" colors for a wreath are green, red and gold. But it is always possible to experiment with color solutions and materials - for example, there are many examples of making a wreath entirely of felt, using dried flowers, dried fruits and even cookies of various shapes.

In addition to the wall wreath, there is also a table version of the Christmas wreath. It appeared in the century before last and served in Europe as a means of counting down the time until Christmas.

On such a wreath four large candles are attached, which symbolize the four Sundays before Christmas. According to tradition, the wreath is decorated with cones, gold and red balls.

Interior Decorations

A decorated Christmas tree is one of the indispensable attributes of Christmas and New Year's holidays. But if there is no possibility or desire to install a large tree in the room, homemade compositions from spruce branches will help.

At the bottom of a decorative basket strengthen floral sponge, in which a few spruce twigs are stuck (sponge will keep the freshness of the twigs until the end of the holidays). Then the branches are decorated with toys (ready-made or homemade), tinsel or rain.

Toys can be put in the basket itself, depending on the theme of the composition. If there is no suitable basket, spruce branches can be hung on a chandelier, a mirror or furniture.

A small table Christmas tree can be made from ribbons of different shades of green. For example, pieces of ribbon can be tied on a twig or cinnamon stick, and then trimmed to the shape of the Christmas tree.

Decorate an ordinary wall of the room with fairy lights will help electric garland. On it you can additionally strengthen your favorite photos or cards, small toys from light material (paper, felt) or Christmas cookies.

Separately, it is possible to note compositions with a gingerbread house, with which you can decorate both the room and the kitchen. A large cake is baked from gingerbread dough. From the cooled cake cut out details of the house, assembled and fastened with honey or sugar glaze.

The finished house is decorated with white icing and food coloring. You can supplement the composition with small toys, nuts, tangerines and dried fruits. The smell of spices fills the house with Christmas spirit, and after the holidays the house can be eaten.

Candles and candle compositions

In addition to the aforementioned wreath, the interior can be decorated with other compositions with candles. They are made on a special stand or a small tray, decorated with twigs and Christmas toys. When making such a composition in no case should not use flammable materials!

The candles themselves can also be decorated. Patterns can be drawn on the candles with special wax felt-tip pens or use colored sheet wax to decorate candles.

The necessary elements are cut out of the wax sheet with a penknife or scalpel, carefully removed from the paper base and glued to the candle (no glue is needed for this, the wax is held in place by the heat of your fingers). The finished candle can be coated with a special varnish.

A nativity scene

The tradition of putting a nativity scene (also called a manger) depicting the story of the birth of Christ in the home has been around for centuries. It may seem that making a nativity scene is a complicated and time-consuming task, but in fact it is not. You can use whatever materials you have at home, and you can also use the right toys.

The basis for the crèche can be an ordinary cardboard box. To make its walls resemble a cave, the box should be pasted inside crumpled Kraft paper. You can also use mounting foam in a can, which after hardening is painted with gray or brown paint. The backdrop can be painted or appliquéd.

If there are no suitable ready-made figures, they can be made in different ways: from paper, plasticine, plugs and scraps of cloth, foam plastic and other materials. The minimum required set of figures for a crèche is Jesus in a manger, Mary and Joseph, an angel or star, and a couple of animals. If the size of the composition allows, you can add figures of shepherds and wise men.

Additionally, you can install lighting (a small LED garland will be especially spectacular) or soft music.