Day 3: the Magic of Christmas

I spent several hours trying to come up with a craft for my sons 5th grade party. It needs to be easy and cheap enough that I could teach it to 25 10 yr olds. Hmmm...Plus it has to appeal to boys and girls. These notebooks were my first idea but were vetoed by ds as being too girlie. So we are going to do pop-up cards instead. To make them I just used the schools die cut machine to cut white paper, two chipboard covers and four pieces of patterned paper, glued the patterned paper to the chipboard, distressed the edges, punched them all with a 1/4 inch hole punch, layered and then bound them with binder rings.

Now about that magic. My kids are getting older and they are challenging Santa's existence. They are also asking for more expensive toys. I've been thinking about when I learned the "truth". Its actually kind of funny in a perverse laugh-at-the-humaness-of-your-parents kind of way. My Mom has her quirks and phases and one of them that began when I was five or six was that christmas should only be religous (I believe the words "Satan Claus" were used). We also had no tree. It was weird, I'm embarrassed ...Sooo whenever I'd go to my Dad's house at Christmas time he would work really hard to convince me that there was indeed a Santa. (They must have been really frustrated with each other). It worked, I was little and I wanted to believe. I also knew that he wasn't actually "real" but that is the fun of being a creative person. I could wholeheartedly believe in something I knew was not "real"

In anycase with my own kids I've wanted to prolong the magic, without losing the true meaning of Christmas, without forcing my kids to believe, without taking away a special and fun part of the season...Basically to find a balance. So when they say "Is Santa really real?" I say "I believe in him". And they let me pretend while they find their own version "believing" in Santa.