Let's Play! Creative Activities for the Day After Christmas

For our family, the day after Christmas is almost as fun as Christmas itself. With the holiday shopping, entertaining and holiday baking quickly becoming a distant memory, December 26 is the day to take it easy and have some old fashioned fun with the entire family.

Play in the snow

Christmas usually brings several inches of snow on the ground in our area. If your family is lucky enough to live in an area of snowfall, grab the sleds and head for the nearest hill! Sledding is a wonderful family event that generates lots of giggles and laughs. Be sure to dress warmly and pack along a couple of thermoses of hot cocoa to keep tummies warm as well. Don't have a sled? No problem. Most ski resorts have both tubing and sledding hills, with equipment rental at affordable prices.

For a little closer to home, try build an enormous snowman, a snow fort, or just flop down in the snow to make snow angels.

When my children were little, they loved creating artistic masterpieces in the snow. We'd fill up empty squirt bottles with colored water and let them "paint" intricate designs in the snow banks. To create your own water paints, add a several drops of food coloring to a squirt bottle filled with water.

Scrapbooking with scraps

Download those digital holiday pictures, and build a holiday scrap book album with your children. Those leftover scraps of Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and greeting cards can all be recycled to create a one-of-a-kind Christmas memory book.

Old gift wrap makes a wonderful background for album pages. To add layers and dimensions to your pages, cut borders and frames from Christmas paper and greeting cards using a scrapbooking scissors, called a "paper shaper." You can even use a punch to create tiny stars and snowflakes out of Christmas gift wrap. And don't forget the gift tags! Leftover gift tags are perfect for labeling holiday photographs.

Make bird feeders