These Are A Few Of Our Favorite Things

My favorite Christmas song growing up was My Favorite Things. It became the inspiration behind a Christmas craft with my grandchildren, producing mini-Christmas trees for their dressers, following the theme, “These are a few of my favorite things…”

Grandma’s ‘treasure (jewelry) box’ being a ‘favorite thing’ of my granddaughter’s, we raided it for old pins, necklaces, and other jewelry scraps. My grandson’s favorite thing is anything car-related, including the movie Cars, so we found a few Cars stickers and some quite used Matchbox® cars.

 We collected:
• Christmas mugs for tree bases
• Metal jar lids to fit over mug tops
• Construction paper
• Pipe cleaners
• Glue gun, hot glue
• Scissors, tape, stapler
• Small ornaments

First, the jar lids were hot-glued to the tops of each mug. We rolled construction paper into cone shapes, stapling and taping them to secure, and cutting the bottoms flush to fit upright within the jar lid.

Next, we coiled red and green pipe cleaners around the tops of each cone, spiraling each down to the base of the cones. Small ornaments were strung along the pipe cleaners. The beads and necklaces were wound around the cone and the pins glued on, for a little lady’s tree.

Our car fan wound his pipe cleaners and ornament coils onto his tree, and wound a black construction paper ‘road’ with yellow paper lines down the middle. Upon these ‘roads,’ his race cars were hot-glued into place. His tree was complete with Cars stickers.

These trees are now proudly displayed on my grandchildren's dressers as a Christmas reminder of their favorite things!

Contributed by Kathy Bolger, Senior Graphic Designer, Today’s Woman magazine.