Holiday Ornaments

It is almost Christmas!! Time has really flew past me this year. I'm officially on winter break and enjoying every minute of it!! My first day of break though (actually first night), I ended up getting a mean stomach bug/flu :( I'm finally fully recovered and yesterday was my first day of actually eating real food besides soup and crackers. Despite the vomiting, chills, and high fever I am so thankful that my body held out on being sick until I went on break. It would have been horrible to get this during school, and there was no way I could have made it in to do any sub. plans. 

Anyways..if any of you are still in session, this could be a last minute project since it is very easy!! Otherwise, you can throw this in your bag of tricks for next year. Each year, my girlfriend and I do this same project for our kids to take home as gifts for their families. The students make snowman ornaments. Over the years we have really perfected these ornaments...if only we had our first attempt at those three years ago we'd probably laugh! Normally, I write the students names on the ornament but thought..hey these are going to their parents/families why not write Merry Christmas or Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian). So, this year the kids were able to choose what they would like written on their ornament along with a color. I'll try my best to show you what we did to create these cute little ornaments:

I went away with my handy dandy cricut to cut out letter using vinyl. Lucky me, I had my friend to help with the cricut cutting as well as the vinyl transferring...BUT her super sweet husband came home from work and did it ALL for us! He was watching  us and said we were transferring the vinyl the hard way...so he explained to us but we didn't understand what he was talking about so he decided to just take over! :) We were happy and went off to baking

Once the vinyl is all done, now come the work of the kiddos. All I did was paint each kids fingers then let them press it onto the ornament.

You need to let the fingerprints dry quite a bit before you allow the kids to draw on them. 

All you need are colorful sharpie pens and the kids can go away at designing their snowmen...

You could also add in fake snow from any craft store and I also added in some glitter. The glitter adds a nice touch because 1. who doesn't like glitter 2. the glitter sticks to the side of the ornaments and looks like falling snow! 

Just a suggestion if you decide to try this craft out next year..you definitely want to find PLASTIC ornaments. The glass ones will shatter VERY easily. 

We also got special boxes that fit these ornaments perfectly. The students decorated the boxes then we wrapped up the gifts. 

PS: I am totally jealous of cold weather right now. In Hawaii we're experiencing some cold weather in the 70's :) haha, hey this is semi-cold for us okay! It's really funny because it was like 70 the other night and everyone was walking around the mall all bundled up. I'm usually in California at this time of year and am totally missing the cold weather!!