Every year, a few days before the 1st of December, I update my list of “Things to do with Children during December”. Updating this list is fun and since last year (when he was 4 ½ last December) I include my son as he was old enough to come up with his own ideas.

The list is like an Advent calendar with an activity instead of chocolate (not that we are going to miss out on eating chocolate…).

My list includes a variety of fun and relatively inexpensive activities for children and for adults too. I try to include things that we don’t do often and that make the month of December magical for us. For example skating, swimming, and skiing are not included as we do them a lot during winter. Also, I make sure that our Advent activities are appropriate and fun for my two young children (5 ½ years old and 2 ½ years old), but still involve my husband and I, as doing all these fun things brings us closer as a family.

So here is our list of Fun Things to do with Children during December, in no particular order:

  1. Make paper snowflakes and decorate the windows with them.
  2. Decorate the house and the Christmas tree.
  3. Make hot chocolate with marshmallows and enjoy it.
  4. Read Christmas-related books.
  5. Bake cookies and share them with our friends.
  6. Celebrate St. Nicholas day.
  7. Visit the Devonian Gardens.
  8. Make a fire in the fireplace and make s’mores.
  9. Go tobogganing.
  10. Watch a Christmas movie (from the library or found on Netflix) and eat homemade popcorn.
  11. Listen and dance to Christmas carols.
  12. Go see the lights at the Calgary zoo.
  13. Attend our neighbours’ Christmas party.
  14. Write a letter to Santa. Decorate and color it nicely.
  15. Go see Santa at our community center and have a photo taken with him.
  16. Dress nicely and take photos of us in front of the fireplace. Send them to all our relatives (in Canada and overseas).
  17. Shovel our elderly neighbour’s driveway.
  18. Choose a gift (a goat or a chicken probably) from Plan Canada’s catalogue.
  19. Make a list of things we are grateful for. Every member of our family is bringing ideas to the table and we keep this list in our photo albums.
  20. Choose a present for the teacher and the bus drivers (there is a bus driver in the morning and another one in the afternoon).
  21. Try a new restaurant.
  22. Make a gingerbread house out of paper/foam.
  23. Attend the Nutcracker ballet put on by the Jeunesse Clasique Ballet Society.

When the children were very little, we had only a few activities on the list. As the years passed and the kids got a little bit older, we added more things.

You can write each idea on a piece of paper and put each note in an envelope. Then you can choose at random an envelope for the activity of the day.

What I like to do is to print the list and put it on the fridge. Then each day we choose an activity. Choosing randomly one activity doesn’t work for us. For example: what if we chose go tobogganing and there is no snow on the ground :)?

Let me know below what you think about the idea of compiling a list of fun things to do with children during December.

Do you have a fun list for the month of December? If you do, what activities does your list have?

 

Image courtesy of digitalart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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