Lucas's Christmas gifts for our family

I have always loved doing crafts. And so even though Lucas is less than two years old, I'm always coming up with these fantastic craft ideas for him to do that pretty much never work out the way I hoped. (Remember when I wanted him to make a Father's Day gift for Dan, and he thought that the homemade, edible, baby-safe finger paint that I lovingly made for him from scratch was some sort of sadistic form of torture?)

Anyway, in October, I went to the craft store to buy paint for the frame in our library, and because I have some sort of disorder that prevents me from leaving a craft store with fewer than ten items, I had to browse all the aisles. You know, just in case there was something that I didn't know I needed until I saw it.

They had Christmas craft items for kids, including foam trees and foam ornament stickers, and I decided that Lucas could probably (maybe, hopefully) decorate the trees for our family members. If you think that this will be another post about how Lucas hated my crafty ideas, you're wrong! (Hallelujah!)

Here were my supplies:

The foam shape stickers in the bucket weren't in the Christmas section.
I bought them because the actual "ornament" stickers were too expensive to buy a ton of.

Lucas LOVED decorating the trees. In fact, even though we've already mailed them to his grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles, he is still decorating them. He will sit down at his table and say "Tree? Sticker? More?" and then we spend half a hour with me peeling the paper backings off of the foam stickers and him putting them on the trees. When he gets bored of the stickers, he likes to collect all of the paper backings, put them into a cup, and then dump them on the floor. Obviously.

When he started making the trees, it was warm enough to wear shorts. Now we have at least six inches of snow. Sigh.

At first, it was difficult for him to put the stickers on the trees because they got stuck on his fingers, and he needed some help "unsticking" them. But the more he did it, the better he got at it (yay for improving fine motor skills!)

I took the best ones, used a hole punch to make a hole and string ribbon through them, wrote Lucas's name and the year on the back, and then mailed them out to our families. I meant to take a picture of all of the trees before I mailed them, but of course I only remembered that I wanted to do that after most of them had already been sealed in the envelopes. So here's three of them:

Yes, he really did them all by himself with no sticker-placement input from me.
Some of the earlier ones have multiple stickers on top of each other, but he was pretty good about spacing them out.

We have a BUNCH of them left at home, many with only a few stickers on them (I don't know if they just weren't working with his artistic vision or if he was going for a minimalist look, but he was "all done" with some of the trees in about a minute,) and I'm sure I'll never be able to bring myself to throw them away, so maybe I'll make some sort of garland with them. I am still abnormally excited that Lucas really enjoyed this craft, so even if you're not amazed by it, pretend it's the best thing you've ever seen in your entire life, ok??

Have you shared a Christmas craft that's easy for young toddlers? Please post the link in the comments!

Wanna click this? Well, ok.