Every year, while my kids are home for Christmas break, we do a couple of fun winter or Christmas craft activities together.
It's one of the traditions I've carried over from my own childhood. I remember making salt dough ornaments and graham cracker houses, complete with full-sized chocolate bars on the roof (my mom doesn't mess around when it comes to candy). Every single year, we spent an evening together as a family and designing and cutting the paper snowflakes that my mom taped to all the windows, a tradition she's carried on with all the grandkids. We don't live near my parents, so we do snowflake cutting on our own, and every year I try to find a couple new projects for us to work on.
We made sock snowmen a few years ago, and my twins have been begging me to make them again ever since. They’re easy, fun to personalize, and look really cute sitting on a window sill or mantle. The kids really get excited about picking out the perfect socks and the right buttons, and then putting everything together in exactly the right way. It's even more fun with Christmas music playing and a batch of cookies ready to eat afterward. Here's the crew my kids and I made this year:
The best thing about sock snowmen is you probably have most of the supplies on hand already. You’ll need white socks (men’s size is your best best), colored socks, buttons, hot glue, toothpicks, rubber bands, and a little thread or string to tie up the hats. Each snowman also requires fiberfill OR one-pound bag of rice. We used rice and it makes the snowmen lots of fun to play with, because you can squish them up tall or smash them down flat. Assemble as shown:
You can get creative and use different colors of buttons or cut the hat differently. Stick toothpicks in the sides, if you want arms on your snowman. I used the discarded “heel” of one of the colored socks we cut up as a scarf on this gal: 
By the way, instead of dumping rice into this one, we just a one-pound bag of rice inside the sock – this way if we decide to dismantle the snowmen after the holidays we can still use the rice. It's only been a few days since we made these, and my boys are already asking what holiday craft we're going to do next. Have any ideas for me? What are some of your favorite holiday crafts or traditions to do with kids?
This post is part of the Favorite Holiday Traditions series, sponsored by Betty Crocker Cookies.