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20 Christmas ideasThinking through how to do Christmas this year, may be hard. We have provided 20 ideas of ways to celebrate Christmas with children and families. These ideas can be used in different ways. For many of these suggestions, it mentions giving resources to children. There are various ways to do this. You may wish to ask the school if they can hand these out for you. It may be that you use these resources for your children at church or it could be that you post out on social media and offer out to those in your community. Feel free to adapt the ideas to fit how best works for you in your situation.Wherever possible, with each activity, include details of your online church services / Christmas events inviting families to join you and provide contact details for yourself or your church leader.Stay within the government guidelines and your church guidelines and carry out the risk assessments needed. Emphasise that any activities taking place outside, children must be accompanied by an adult.If lockdown should continue past the 2nd December, then unfortunately the first five activities may not be possible.1.Christmas trail – Print on card and laminate around 20 ‘Angels’ and hide around your community. Each angel could have either a character from the Bible story written on them, where children have to see how many different characters they can find or the angels could have a word on each one that forms a bible verse.These angels could be placed on your community notice board, in shop windows, your church window etc. If you have large church grounds, the angels could be hidden in the grounds. Encourage families to see how many angels they can find.2.Sheep trail – Find the names of the sheep (original idea from Messy Church)Using either knitted sheep, carboard cut out sheep or printed laminated sheep, give each sheep a name and place them round your community. It could be in a shop window, church window, school window or the windows of people’s houses (where they can be seen clearly from the footpath). (You might like to ask families/shop keepers etc that host a sheep in their window to name their own sheep!) Produce a leaflet which lists the different places where families can find the sheep. At the side of those places, leave space for children to write the names of the sheep. Include the Christmas story on the leaflet. If you would like, you may choose to encourage the parents to email you when completed to get a little prize for taking part. 3.Wise men treasure trail – As the wise men had to follow the star to find baby Jesus, you could set up a hunt where families need to follow clues to find their way to baby Jesus. Each clue could be written on a star. They have to follow the clue on the first star to lead them to the next one and so on. This could be set around your church grounds or in the community.4.Outdoor nativity – Set up a nativity scene outside your church. Is someone you know creative in woodwork and can create and paint the nativity characters using materials suitable for outdoors? Could you get your young people involved in this project? Light up your seen with outdoor spotlights in the evening.Being more adventurous – paint with UV paint and use Ultra Violet Lighting to light it up at night.If you have a nativity scene that is normally displayed inside your church, you could consider putting it in the window where it can be seen by passers-by. Another option is to lend it to the school and let them display it in one of their classrooms.5.Outdoor human nativity event – Using your church grounds, or grounds surrounding your village hall (with permission) create an outdoor nativity scene. Use people from the same household per scene. Break down the Christmas story and create scenes that dressed up actors can stand / sit in their area. Make the scene as creative as possible, including a manger, bales of hay, an open gazebo to create Mary’s house etc. For each scene, write a short part of the story on large card that can be displayed in front of them. Rope off each area, so families are not able to go up close. 6.Colouring competition – Send out a colouring sheet of the Christmas story. Have children colour the picture and ask if their parents can post it back to you to display in your church windows. – Have prizes to drop off either at their homes or schools.7.Christingle – Offer to the school to send the resources to their classrooms for the teachers to make the Christingles with the children. Produce a short video clip explaining the Christingle and the meaning it has or send in a worksheet. You may decide to do this with your own church children and promote it via social media. This would require delivering to many homes, or having a set day, where families come to the church grounds to pick up the resources needed for them to make at home. For more ideas on this go to.ukMessy Christingle windows – Use creative art work to present the Christmas story. Each day of advent add a new picture to your church windows, building up the Christmas story for people to see.9.Create a Christmas booklet – Include the Christmas story, puzzles, games craft activities, Christmas recipes, a message of Christmas, prayers and competitions. Include in your booklet details of your church services / activities over Christmas. 10.Christmas Craft Activity Box - Post or deliver to your children – Christmas crafts for children to do at home e.g. home-made advent calendar, Christmas tree decorations, ideas for creating a nativity scene using lolly sticks and pipe cleaners etc. 11.Gifts to your neighbourhood. Encourage your church members to buy a small Christmas gift and deliver to a local neighbour that they wouldn’t normally buy a gift for. (If you know families can’t afford to do this and your church is able to, suggest that they can pick up a gift from church to give to a local neighbour)12.Christmas Cards – Encourage your church to design a Christmas card. Have them printed with church service details inside. Hand out half a dozen to each of your church families and encourage them to hand out to their neighbours.13.Christmas Zoom Party – Deliver (a couple of days before) a Christmas in a bag/box to all your children signed up for attending your party. The boxes will have all you need for the party, including resources for games, craft etc and a Christmas treat. Run a Christmas party on zoom and include a version of the Christmas story and a short interactive message. There are many ideas for Christmas crafts on google and pinterest. Be creative in your games and adapt for online. Musical bumps and musical statues work well. Try not to get the children out as they will lose interest quickly. Keep the games fast moving. Another games is ‘What’s in the bag?’ Have a Christmas bag with different items inside and the children have to guess what it is. You describe the item without using key words and have children write in the chat what they think the item is.14.Christmas Bake off (on zoom) – baking or decorating Christmas themed biscuits. Families will need to sign up for this. Decide if you will provide the biscuits in advance or if you will ask families to make / buy some before-hand. Families will have to resource what they need for decorating their biscuits. Everyone needs to log into zoom and show their undecorated biscuits, then give your families a set amount of time to get creative and decorate them. Encourage families to keep on camera so everyone can watch each other during this time. Play some background music and talk to families, encouraging them in their work. At the end, have each family present their biscuits and decide on your top three to win a prize. 15.Filming a nativity story – ask various families / church members to take part in your nativity by dressing up and miming, a part to the Christmas story. When editing all the clips together, add narration over the top. Invite your families to a service where the nativity will be shown.16.Filming questions – Have separate zoom conversations with various members of your congregation of different ages. Record your zoom meeting and then you will be able to edit it afterwards. Ask them the same questions like, what does Christmas mean to you? What is your favourite part about Christmas? What is your funniest memory from Christmas? What is your favourite Christmas carol and why? Edit the clips together, to present one question at a time with the various answers (keep the answers short and display quiet music in the background. Present in the online Christmas service.17.Christmas story videos – The Bible Society have produce great video to use online. ‘It begins in Bethlehem’ by Bob Hartman .uk/christmas Bob Hartman and Sam Hargreaves have produced a great song that accompanies this. - Please check copyright before using. You can find this in Bob Hartman’s Rhyming Bible. Choose a song that works for you. You might like to encourage families to engage in creative prayer whilst the song is playing. 18.Christmas family games night - on zoomEncourage families to wear Christmas hats or jumpers and get together to play games online.*Christmas bingo - Email out cards (or post where families do not have access to a printer) with images of characters from the Christmas story. Families print out the cards and circle 6 Characters / images that represent Christmas. Play bingo in the usual way, calling out characters instead of numbers. *The Price is right – Have some Christmas items like a turkey, box of crackers, a stocking, etc and ask each family to guess the price of the items. You could fill up a jar with sweets and ask them to guess how many sweets are in the jar. *Name that tune – Play the first couple of notes from a Christmas carol/song and see how quickly families can guess what it is.19.Christmas Family Prayers - Jesus came to bring hope! Most years at Christmas we go to church to celebrate the birth of Jesus, we go to church for our Christingle service, we go to church for our nativity service, we go to church for our carol service, this year, we have a great opportunity to bring Jesus into our homes. Encourage your families to do just that as they find creative ways to pray. *Prayer advent calendar - Each day the families fill a square with a prayer. *Encourage families to write prayers for people they know, place them in a gift bag with a small chocolate and deliver to those people.*Send families a short video clip each day of someone reading a bible verse, giving a short focus on what they could pray for. Ask various people from your church to take part in sharing.*Provide a Christmas box with 25 pieces of folded paper. Each piece of paper will have a focus for prayer. Each day during advent, the families open their Christmas box taking out one random piece of paper and pray for what’s written.*Ask families to take the word ‘Christmas’ and see what words they can come up with, beginning with each letter, that they can be thankful for and then pray for these things. E.g. ‘C’ = Christ, Clothes, Chocolate ‘H’ = Heating, Homes, Hospitals etc20.Replacing rainbows with baby Jesus – The rainbows in windows of houses worked really well. Encourage children to draw a manger scene and display in their window’s at home. If you require help in thinking through and developing these activities, please do get in touch. You can email Fiona at fiona@.uk ................
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