Santa and Reindeer Activities with Christmas Crafting Traditions

Every year when we begin our Christmas tree decorating, my kids pull out their Santa hats, Christmas stockings, and reindeer-antler headbands for improv theater, with photo shoot, and follow-up scrapbook crafting. What began one Christmas as spontaneous musical theater grew into a holiday tradition of theatrics, while hanging stockings, decorating the Christmas tree, and preserving memories by scrapbooking.

Theatrical Christmas Supplies

The necessary supplies are few and can be inexpensively accumulated over the years, or gathered at one time, from any discount store as soon as holiday supplies are available.

1 - red and white Santa hat
1 - red sweatshirt (for Santa)
1 - or more headbands (for each child) with felt reindeer antlers
1 - or more brown sweatshirts (for each child playing a reindeer)
1 - camera

Santa Sleigh-Ride Improv Theater

Get your kids suited up, and they will know how to get into position, for Santa and his reindeer sleigh ride. You can read them the classic tale "The Night Before Christmas" found online at Christmas Tree Farm Network. Also online, sing along with Gene Autry, karaoke-style (with lyrics) to several rounds of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLf0DDt3Xiw.

Snap lots of pictures while your kids are in costume and clowning-around "in character". Make sure to capture pictures of them singing, decorating the tree, hanging stockings, and portraying Santa and his reindeer on their sleigh ride. When all your Christmas decorating is finished, and everyone has had their holiday fun, you can scrapbook your photos.

Santa Sleigh-Ride Scrapbook Supplies

Christmas photos from Santa and his reindeer activities (above)
Several pages of heavy card stock and/or several pages of Christmas-border print papers
Christmas-theme rubber stamps and child-safe green and red ink stamp pads
Christmas-theme stickers
Gold-ink pen
Glue sticks

Scrapbook Archiving

Arrange pictures onto heavy card stock and/or Christmas-theme bordered papers, angled to show all activities, or separate each activity per page. When pictures are positioned the way you want, glue into place with a glue stick.

Add Christmas stickers onto the corners of photos, add rubber stamp images, and make sure to label each picture in gold pen. In Christmases past, I created a "Night Before Christmas" book using photos from my kids theatrics, adding scrapbooking touches, and with every page I included a different line or two, from the classic poem, until it became a heirloom book.

To further preserve these memories, I add back-to-back scrapbook pages into clear page protectors, to fit into an easy-to-fill 3-ring binder. The binder cover can be padded and then covered with fabric or felt, or you can slip your own scrapbook page into a clear-binder cover sleeve.