Title: “Connecting Cousins at Christmas”
Exhibitor: Rebecca Johns
Description: Building unity with extended family members can be
accomplished by keeping cousins in close contact. Christmas is an especially good time to participate in activities where cousins can share their time and talents. This project provides some good ideas on helping cousins keep in contact.
How To’s:
The Christmas Picnic
Forget cooking an elaborate meal that leaves you exhausted and the children refuse to eat! Simplify the food, and leave time and energy to do a Christmas Project together as a family. You will end with a scrapbook page exchange between families instead of gifts.
The picnic: Set out a small basket, colored paper sacks or tin or plastic sand pail for each guest on a red plastic tablecloth on top of a large table. Line each one with a colorful cloth square or bright paper napkin. Just before guests arrive, fill each one with your choice of:
- 2 ham or turkey sandwiches on 2 inch round rolls
- an individual serving bottle of sparkling apple juice
- a plastic cup of layered red and green Jello
- a plastic cup of potato salad from the deli
- a small apple, or a tangerine
- a small box of raisins or package of chips
- a Christmas cookie
- a Christmas napkin and plastic spoon
Small eaters can put items they don’t want on the tray from the beginning, so there is not much waste Big eaters can help themselves to seconds from the tray. (Tip: Have peanut butter and jelly, extra rolls, and a knife handy to make a snack for children who are simple eaters. This is a good idea at any family dinner, no matter the menu.)
To clean up, each guest puts his clutter into the sack and throws it away. If using baskets or pails, remove cloth napkin and stack.
Completed projects can be taken home by whomever the team decides. They can also be given to people the family would like to cheer up.
- Decorate gingerbread houses with candy
- Buy small sized candy bars and put together on a foil-covered cardboard to make a train. Decorate with candy adhered with frosting.
- Cut edge of a two-by-four inch board in a slant (to make the sloped roof), then cut length of board into lots of little wooden houses. Paint with acrylic paints to make a Christmas village.
- Buy a four-foot-high tree for each tem and make decorations for it from colored cardstock, glitter, and cookie cutters to trace for shapes. Little children like to brush glue on cut-out Christmas shapes or old Christmas cards and then put them face-down in a pie pan of glitter. Hang on the tree with a red bow.
- Have each person write a page to a missionary in the family and decorate it with stamps and stickers. Send as a booklet to the missionary with special (small group) pictures taken during the evening.
- A taffy pull is always fun.
Set out supplies needed on trays before the party. Bring them to the table covered with the plastic tablecloth.
- Divide group into several teams (with mixed ages) to work together on the project. It nice to separate families and let cousins get acquainted as they work. Pair a teenager with a small child, parents with relatives they seldom see, favorite cousins the same age together, within the teams. Left to themselves, each family will probably work together and not bond with anyone new.
- Take lots of pictures yourself, or ask a teenager to move around during the evening and take pictures. Take close-ups of two or three people, and be sure they are looking at you and smiling. People at work, with heads down, don’t turn out to be memorable photos. Ask them to put an arm around each other or put their heads closer together, or ask someone else to join the group to fill the picture. Get doubles and put a poster for next year’s party, and let people take the extra copies. A memory is more permanent if they can look at a picture several years down the road. Keep one copy in an on-going book that you add to each year. Put the book out at the part for them to remember past good times together.
Feeling frustrated with finding the money to buy gifts for extended family, or spending yours in the kitchen cooking food gifts for them? Here’s our solution:
Ask each family to make a two-page scrapbook page of photos taken of important events in their family during the past year. Title the page with the family name and the year (also a new address and phone if they have moved). Color copy one for each family coming to dinner, plus the families that are out of town. Put them back-to back in one plastic page per set, and bring to the Christmas party.
At the party, put each family page in a separate pile around the table. Add those that you have had sent to you by relatives living away from town. Each family goes arounmd the table and takes one page.
Compile them in a three-ring binder with a divider for each family We add a new divider when a child gets married and starts her own family This book becomes a treasured family record. It is especially good when cousins marry and go away to school and begin to have their children. It is a nice way for cousins to keep up with each other, but is not very time-consuming or expensive.
TIP: We have found it successful to have a scrapbook night for the mothers and daughters to come in November. They bring their pictures, make their page, and it’s all ready for Christmas giving.
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It sometimes works better to gather mothers and children in the afternoon for this project, then invite Dads to come for the dinner. This is good for families with children who need to be home early to get to bed. Our family does this when we make bread as the project. We have had Bread Day for twenty-five years.
Mothers and children come in the afternoon with a rolling pin and two cookie sheets or 9”x 13” pans. My sister has the bread dough prepared and ready to roll out. You may also use frozen bread dough and have it thawed and ready to roll out.
The children of each family roll the dough out into a rectangle, spread it with butter, sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar, roll it into a log, and cut it into rolls with a thread. The rolls can be arranged in a wreath shape, a Christmas Tree shape, or in a 9”x 13” pan. Let rise, then back.
A second loaf is made by each family where the dough is rolled into ropes and braided. It could also be molded into a round teddy bear loaf or a Santa face with curls for the beard.
While the bread rises, the children play or watch a Christmas
video. The mothers visit and set out
the dinner. We usually have chili
or soup that can be made the day before and reheated, a green salad, and the
hot bread fresh from the oven. We
eat the plain bread and take the cinnamon rolls home to freeze and heat on
Christmas morning.
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