This Week's Christmas Craft

I apologize. I am being completely facetious with that title. I've already seen people on facebook complaining about Christmas merchandise being stocked in the stores. I know that there are a great deal of people who get really flustered by the mention of Christmas before Thanksgiving. I am not trying to tease you folks.

The little guy and I did inadvertently end up doing a Christmas craft this week but I promise it was unintentional. And while I personally have never been a fan of seeing Christmas merchandise on the shelves during the beginning of October I feel a little differently about it this year as I have been working on getting my Christmas gifts all planned out since sometime last month.

I wanted to do a craft this week with little Abe. I've done this craft before while I worked in a learning based day care years ago and I really liked it back then. I went upstairs to find my stock pile of tissue paper (which I'm now wondering if I disposed of when I did the basement clean up). All I could find were various types of Christmas tissue paper that I'd saved from gifts I've been given at Christmas. And a few new sheets of red, green, and white as well. "Hmm, I already planned on doing this with him, well, I guess we're just going to have to do it in Christmas colors now."

This is the simplest craft ever. But my little guy did end up struggling with it. First he and I tore some tissue paper into square-ish pieces. I put a little elmer's glue into a dish. I'm talking like 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon little. Then I added probably two tablespoons of water. I really watered it down a lot. I stirred the water and glue up and then we painted one side of the torn tissue paper with the glue water. As soon as the tissue square is covered in glue water you press it to the side of the jar. Once the jar was completely covered I went over the whole jar with a layer of glue water. And done. After it was dry I set a candle in it and we got to see our lovely craft glow. The specks you see on ours are because we had a few sheets of tissue paper with glitter in the paper.

Little Abe was having a difficult time "painting" the squares of tissue with the glue water. His tissue kept tearing and balling up. I think he was just using too much force which is completely understandable for a three year old. I felt badly that he struggled with our fun craft so once the jar was done I randomly pulled an old pizza box off the table (that I'd completely meant to throw out that very morning) and told him that he could paint sticky water all over the box and decorate it with all the torn paper that he'd like. While I personally am not as fond of how visually stunning the pizza box covered in tissue looks compared with the jar holding a lit candle he really enjoyed painting the box, sticking tissue all over it, and then doing it again, and again, and again. The only problem is that now he thinks we're going to be keeping an old pizza box covered in tissue paper. Oops.