How to Create Indoor Snow

Children love snow. Whether adults enjoy this fluffy white powder falling from the skies generally depends upon whether or not they have to travel in it and whether or not they happen to enjoy being cold and wet whenever they venture outdoors. However, regardless of whether adults love snow, children are almost always apt to pray for a massive snow fall that will let them skip school days or just enjoy the pleasures of sledding, snow angels, and synthesizing snow men. Sadly, for many children in warmer climates, these prayers and petitions for snow never yield any form of white precipitation, and they are left without the fun of snow over their winter holidays. For anyone who lives in these warmer climates (or who simply is in a region where there is no snow falling this year), here are a few fun ways to entertain your kids by creating "snow" indoors.

1) Instead of just making a gingerbread house, create an entire miniature gingerbread village. You can use either a flat slab of gingerbread as the base of the village or a clean piece of cardboard. To give your village the look of snow, cover the entire base of the village with a layer of icing/frosting; be sure to also cover all of the roofs of the houses with the same "snowy icing" to complete the feeling of a winter wonderland. To make the "snow" seem even more real, sprinkle a layer of shredded coconut shavings on top of the snow/icing; this will give a more three dimensional feeling to your snowy village.

2) Create snowflake sugar cookies. These are fun and delicious and will create a miniature blizzard of sugar and flour throughout your kitchen. To create these cookies, simply bake a batch of sugar cookies just like you normally would. Cut out small circles of paper that will fit onto the top of your sugar cookies after they have been baked. While the sugar cookies are in the oven, cut the paper pieces into intricate snowflake designs; once the cookies have been baked, put a "snowflake" onto the top of each cookie, and sprinkle sugar over the whole cookie. Carefully remove the paper snowflake, and you should be left with a lovely snowflake sugar pattern on the top of your cookie. You may wish to put your cookies into the oven for another minute after you create the snowflake pattern on the top as a way to stabilize the design a little better.

3) Finally, an easy way to create your own indoor snow is to make the "traditional" paper snowflake cutouts. To do this, take a piece of paper (almost any size will work) and fold it over several times until you have a "pie piece" shape. Then cut small snippets into the folded paper; be creative with your designs. Once you have finished cutting, carefully unfold the paper and you should be left with a lovely paper snowflake. To create the feeling of indoor snow with these snowflakes, tape them with easily removable tape on your windows and hang them from long strings of varying lengths from the ceiling (preferably at locations where they won't be a safety hazard).