Our 2010 Christmas Ornament

We're in the midst of Lent now, but I finally had a few moments to go through some pictures and found the ones of our annual Christmas ornament for 2010. This year, I happened across a book at the library. First Son was so excited by it that I let him choose the ornament for the year -- cinnamon gingerbread men.

I traced the men (yes, all men; I didn't even think of making some of them women until I wrote this post) onto cardboard. I save the rectangles of cardboard in our Amazon boxes. They always come in handy. Kansas Dad had to help cut them out for me because my hand ached too much before I finished.

I let the kids "paint" them with glue and sprinkle cinnamon on top. The book instructed us to let them dry completely before shaking off the extra cinnamon, but I shook a few while the glue was still wet and think they turned out much smoother.

I didn't get a great picture of the kids decorating them, but we had a blast. In fact, I think this was one of the best ornaments yet. They were so creative! I dumped out a box of fabric, yarn, sequins, stickers, ribbons, and bits of interesting papers for them to rifle through and they were cutting and pasting all on their own. They wore themselves out before we finished enough for us, our parish priest, grandparents, aunts, uncles and (this year, for the first time) godparents, so I had to finish one or two myself. It was definitely the best ornament experience yet, though.

Here's my favorite one by Second Daughter. I think she only made two.

First Daughter loved this activity. Here are a couple of the ones she made.

First Son became so attached to his gingerbread men, he didn't want to give any away! (We only keep one.) Among others, he made a Sumo wrestler (with a red nose).

I did an online search for cinnamon ornaments and most of the results involved making a dough with cinnamon and applesauce. Sounds interesting for a future year.

This particular ornament was very economical to make. I did buy the sequins because they looked fun and we didn't have any, but everything else was from our stock of craft supplies. The cinnamon was probably the most expensive item, but you only need a few sprinkles of it for each little gingerbread man.

Christmas Ornaments Kids Can Make by Kathy Ross is the book we found at the library. I liked this ornament, but I'm not sure we'd select any of the others.