Children's Present Making

14th December

The weekends leading up to Christmas are always hectic for everyone, but hopefully fun too.  My children have been encouraged and in the early years, heavily helped, to make their own Christmas presents for all the adults in the family.  As they have grown older, the onus is now firmly on their shoulders.  With that in mind instead of each of them making a present for every adult, ie each adult in the family has traditionally received a homemade gift from each child, they have cleverly joined forces and now make the presents together, thus halving the number they need to make.  Cunning.  Some of you may remember that earlier this month I was quite twitchy as neither child had mentioned the present making nor to my knowledge had even begun to think what to do.  I should have more faith in them and so publically declare that I am proud of them as  they had thought and now have begun and are in full swing.  Today will be a mammoth finishing off session I believe.

Both children working as a team to make presents

Years ago, I would come up with the present making idea and would hold the children's hand to create some sort of present, see earlier posting of some of the items they have made.  Gradually as the years have passed, my involvement has reduced.  But the basic gist is the same:  to source an idea, either magping it from somewhere else or coming up with a novel idea.  The children this year did approach me for ideas and we scoured the internet, Pinterest, is a wonderful source of inspiration, but my word you could waste hours and even days on there.  We also scoured through my numerous Christmas books and craft books alike.  Once the two of them had finally agreed on what to make, this took some compromising and both have decided to start earlier next year (umm, that theme sounds familiar!), they were ready to gather the necessary equipment. 




A quick walk down to the river to forage underneath the pine trees, produced the first of the needed
items plus a big raid on my hoarded stores and they were ready to begin.  Having started at 5pm on a school night, there was not much time for them to actually complete anything and so now my house resembles a messy, badly organsied piece work factory.  I do not know how they managed it, but there are signs of their productive efforts in every room downstairs!  Argghhhhhh.  Do you wonder why you start something sometimes, the familiar adage springs to mind, "It seemed like a good idea at the time..."

Hopefully the adults in the family will appreciate as they always do, the time, effort and the fact that the siblings have had to work alongside each other and in partnership to produce the gifts they will be given this year.

As for me, I too need to finish off the multitude of presents I have begun each one is about 95% finished, but in my eagerness to begin the next one, I did not quite put the icing on the cake so to speak.  Oh dear, much to do! 

 ♥  Loving it really ♥