• Christmas family gatheringchristmas family image by sumos from Fotolia.com
  
  The Christmas season usually finds mom and dad off work for a few days and the kids are home from school for the holidays. It isn't often the whole family can gather together these days, so make good use of the time together. When it's cold outside, the house is toasty warm, there are cookies baking in the oven and the holiday spirit has a firm hold, that's the time to sit down for a fun afternoon of family crafting.
  
  

Bird Food Ornaments

• Gather pine cones if they grow in your area, or use apples, oranges or large sunflower heads to make edible ornaments for the birds. Mom or dad can melt suet and peanut butter together to make a nutritious paste, then everyone can have fun smearing it on cones or fruit and rolling the sticky ornaments in bird seed on trays to coat them completely. Push a piece of strong wire up through the bottom of each fruit, then bend it to hold in place and make a hook on the other end to hang it. For a different style of ornament, put raisins, berries, fruit chunks or pieces of suet on toothpicks and stick them in apples. Hang by ribbons tied around toothpicks stuck in the apple on either side. Remove empty toothpicks occasionally as birds eat the food so they are not in the way. Hang your ornaments from a tree near a window so the whole family can watch and identify the birds.
  
  

Boxed Village

• Gather small boxes of various sizes and shapes. Get out the construction paper, scissors, markers and scrapbook supplies. Give each family member a box, and have her create a house or other building from the materials. One child can make a church; another can make a bank or movie theatre; have another build a grocery store or residential house; and so on. Create a whole village to put under the tree, on a soft white tree skirt to look like snow, for a pretty Christmas decoration made by the entire family. Add tiny homemade trees, people or a toy train traveling a circle around the village, for more fun.
  
  

Christmas Tree Garlands

• Make up a batch of fresh popcorn. Give everyone a needle threaded with a long piece of nylon fishing line. Fill a big bowl full of cranberries and another with popcorn, and tell stories or sing Christmas carols while you sit around the table making an old-fashioned popcorn and cranberry garland for the tree. For added decoration, paint small wooden holiday cutouts--drill two holes in each so string goes in through the top, down behind the ornament, and up through the second hole from the back to make the ornament face forward. String on the garland every foot or so between strands of popcorn and cranberries. Gingerbread men, candy canes and stars are good shapes to use.
  
  

Family Baking

• Gingerbread housegingerbread house image by jedphoto from Fotolia.com
  
  Make a bunch of Christmas cookies, with everyone contributing his own favorite variety. Combine ingredients for a basic cookie mix ahead of time, and then have each child choose a simple recipe made from the mix; see the References section for recipes. The fun part comes in decorating with sprinkles, colored sugars, nuts and candies. As an alternative, have the whole family make a 'gingerbread' house together. Assign everyone graham crackers to decorate as walls, roof or chimney, using icing and other sweets. When all the building parts are finished, erect the structure on a flat platter using icing for glue to assemble it.