Stocking Shaped Holidays Cookies

Regular sugar cookies need not be boring. Have fun making and decorating these.

What You Need: Sugar cookie recipe (coming soon) or store bought cookie dough, rolling pin, stocking shaped cookie cutter or piece of cardboard, white icing, red and green food coloring, red sugar sprinkles, baking sheet, a spatula, piping bag or ziplock bag and butter knife.

What To Do: Prepare cookie dough, flour countertop and rolling pin. Roll out dough and cut cookies. place on cookie sheet and bake. While cookies are baking separate white icing into three portions. Color one red, one green and keep on white. Once cookies are baked and cooled, ice them carefully red on the bottom and white on time just like a Christmas stocking. Then carefully add sprinkles on top of red section.


To personalize, use the piping bag (or a ziplock with the corner carefully snipped) to write names on the cookies.

If you don't have a cookie cutter draw a Christmas stocking on a piece of heavy paper or cardboard and carefully cut it out. Use it to trace out the cookies.

No rolling pin? Use a can of corn! or any other can you have in the pantry...

NOTE: If you're using the ziplock, BE VERY GENTLE when piping, as the bag will tear if you squeeze to hard!

The Family Turkey

Here's one activity that will allow the whole family to get involved in hunting for materials to make your turkey one of a kind.

What You Need: a turkey coloring page print out, glue and whatever you can find to decorate.

What To Do: As a family talk about what you want your turkey to look like: life-like, colorful, cartoonish, etc. then hunt for materials to decorate your turkey. (You can use grains of rice, stripes of material, leaves, tissue paper, crayons, glitter, ANYTHING that you can get to stick to the paper!! Ours has feathers, felt and a tissue paper beak)

Cornacopia: The Horn of Plenty

This is a super simple Thanksgiving craft that's great for small hands and older children. It's easily adaptable and can be made as simple or as complex as you (and your child) can imagine.

What You Need: A stripe of construction paper; glue, tissue paper, pom-poms, other small trinkets and decorations

What To Do: Roll the strip of construction paper into a cone shape that has a point (think waffle cone). Stuff the horn with colored tissue paper and then add pom poms and other decoration to be the "food" in the horn.

Math Monsters

These great homemade goblins are great for Halloween and also reinforce math skills. Use them to help teach shapes, colors, patterns, or even multiplication (3 sets of 2 arms equals 6 arms)

What You Need:  Construction Paper, glue, scissors, crayons and decorations if you have them: googly eyes, pompoms, feathers, yarn etc.

What to Do:  Cut out different shapes of various sizes and put them together to create a "monster". There really is no wrong way to do this, since it's a "monster".  Your child's monster can have three eyes, six legs, a mop of curly yarn hair. Let them be as creative as they want.

For older kids, use brass fasteners to hold the pieces together so that the monster can move. Younger kids can just glue their monsters together.