drawanyway.com

Apologies: it may be too late to pass this information on, but I think that I finally stumbled upon the perfect formula for making Christmas cards with two-year-and-eleven-month-olds. We’ve tried a variety of techniques over the past few weeks, and it’s been hard to strike a balance between the cards she had fun making, and the ones I’d be happy to send out.

Finally, we’ve cracked it, and, if you’re as disorganised as I am (almost certainly due to the presence of the afore-mentioned two-years-and-eleven-month-old), you might just be able to benefit from the formula I’m about to share.

Yes, the last posting date has passed, but there are still the cards to hand out to friends and family in person. Or the cards you might make next year. After all, I’m guessing that Tabitha, age three and eleven months, will have reached almost grand master perfection by then.

OK, here’s the method:

1. Cut out a roughly Christmas tree shape, ie a triangle (with trunk if you are feeling ambitious), out of green wrapping paper or any other vaguely green paper you have. Glue this onto your card.
2. Cut several different sized circles from a magazine or wrapping paper to act as your baubles. Let your child place and glue these. A solid glue stick will minimise the mess.
3. If your child can wield scissors, let them cut out a few squares to be parcels under the tree. if not, do it yourself but let him ‘decorate’ them with pens.
4. Raid your recent stash of C-Beebies (or the like) comics for stickers that might be added (that’s where the littler stars came from).
5. Put a cut-out star or a star sticker at the top of the tree.
6. We had some alphabet stickers so I put the initials of the family this card’s going to on the parcels.
7. That’s it - and a good thing too because your child is now tipping glue down the back of the sofa/sticking glitter to the cat/using your envelopes as handkerchiefs.

I like the result and we both had fun making it - and you can’t get much better than that.