Santa-at-Home.com: Christmas Graphics, Recipes, Artwork and More

This is the time of the year when kids' thoughts turn to the man in the ruby-red suit and lists of all the goodies they hope he'll bring to them Christmas morn! Of course, the holiday season would NOT be complete without the obligatory letter to Santa. And with today's kids, snail mail just isn't good enough; they want to send an e-mail!

This at first seems easy enough, after all all you have to do is type "Santa e-mail" and hit search, right? Wrong! A few years ago, in my quest to find a site that would keep my son enthralled and was kid approved, I decided to let my fingers do the hunting and my search began. I began with the famous search engine that most use, google. After trying this I was inundated with no less than 3807 hits! Now, don't get me wrong, I love my kids to pieces, but there is no way I am going to try ALL of these Web sites! After eliminating some hits on the list, due to the content, I settled on a half dozen or so to check out BEFORE letting my son in on Santa's website. I found out long ago that trusting a site just because it claims to be for kids can and has been a real mistake. So these days I check them out carefully before I let my children loose. When I discovered this site he was just at the brink of not believing and I do not want to spoil his Christmas dreams at this time! I am planning on investigating other Santa Web sites as well, and will report back on any others I feel are worth the visit!

I found myself fortunate to chance upon a GREAT Web site right out of the blue! It is www.santa-at-home.com and it is filled with wonderful graphics, recipes, children's artwork, activities, a Christmas countdown and, of course, a letter-to-Santa page.

On the "Send Your Letter to Santa" page, although I found the fill-in-the- blank form letter a child writes to Santa, to be a bit bland, leaving no room for creativity on the part of the child, I must admit that in less than 10 minutes there was a letter awaiting my son in our email box. While it was not especially personal, it satisfied him in that it was cute with a stylized font and graphics. He is in fact anxious to e-mail him again with a more up to date list. I WAS impressed though that Santa did not promise any gifts yet was friendly and even asked for cookies for himself and carrots for his reindeer!

The "Activity Page" was by far MY favorite with 25 different activities to choose from including dot to dot, fill in the blanks, word searches, mixed up word puzzles, coloring pages, and a fill in the blanks poem for children to create. These were so well received by my son, that we are planning on using some of them as paper games during his upcoming birthday party. They raged from simple to more complex, covering a large array of ability levels. These would be great to copy off and create a book of sorts for the kids to work on during a long car ride over the Holidays....with a new red notebook holding them in place, the kids would be busy for hours!

"Mrs.Claus' Recipes" was another section that was a pleasant surprise. Many other Web sites have a few tried and true recipes to choose from, but this one has no less than 16. With names such as Santa's Whiskers, a cookie made with a luscious blend of chocolate and coconut, Jingle Bells;1-2-3 Cookies, Rudolph Cinnamon Cookies and my favorite Candy cane cookies; made with crushed peppermint candy canes, these promise to satisfy all cookie connoisseurs! The candy cane cookie, I must admit, brought back many childhood memories and I can guarantee that they are as good as the recipe shows, and they will quickly become a favorite in your home at Christmas!

"Send Your Artwork" is a section devoted to children and their art. It invites the children to send Mrs.Claus their art work in an email with attachment (because after all Santa is awfully busy with toys and such right now) and they will be regularly added to the webpage. On the day I visited the site there were 41 examples of artwork shown with a promise of updating being done often. You also can send a postcard using this artwork but we have not had a chance to do so, so I cannot speak for the quality of that option.

"Santa's Message" is a short, to the point message from Santa asking children to be good and wishing them a happy holiday! The message is cute and nice and though it is somewhat a repeat of what we usually hear from Santa, is presented in a nice, pleasant way!

Lastly, "Christmas Countdown," is a lot of fun for all ages! I logged onto this about two months before Christmas and was thrilled to see not only the weeks, days, but hours, and even minutes I had to wait until the bearded man came to our home on Christmas Day!

Needless to say, we will be visiting this area often as my son enjoys watching the time go by until he can open all of his gifts! This also could prove to be a good practical lesson in math as we try to figure out on our own the time remaining and then compare with the page!

This website is a fun one and educational too in that the various games/activities and the countdown encourage skills other than vegetating in front on the TV all day! If you are looking for a website that is geared for children of all ages and is not filled with advertisements for various toys, then I heartily recommend this one! We've added it to our favorites file and we plan on visiting it many times before Christmas!