Holiday Activities
Emma Delgado (8)
The soft sound of Christmas music is playing from the radio, mom and dad are recording and watching the kids open their gifts. Once they’re done they throw the wrapping paper away and start eating their yummy breakfast that consists of eggs and pancakes. The music gets louder and the screen fades to black and the end credits roll, what a happy ending. Christmas nowadays is not like the movies. Most people sit around, maybe watch one or two holiday movies and call it a day. What happened to the holiday spirit? What happened to the fun Christmas activities? Did we run out of ideas?
One Christmas activity that could be fun to try out could be Secret Santa. In order to play Secret Santa, members of a group of friends or family draw names at random to become someone’s Secret Santa. The Secret Santa is given a Wishlist of gift ideas to choose from to give to their chosen giftee. After opening their present, the giftee has to guess which member of the group was their Secret Santa, the only rule for Secret Santa is you CANNOT tell anyone who you got. This is a fun activity that my moms side of the family does every year.
Another fun activity to do could be making gingerbread houses and cookies. They sell pre-made gingerbread houses that just need to be assembled and decorated at places like Walmart, H-E-B, and even Dollar Tree. Or if you wanted you could make the gingerbread yourself. In order to make gingerbread, combine brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, salt, corn syrup, butter, and vanilla in the bowl of a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, then use a cookie cutter to make the gingerbread house shapes. I myself hate the taste of gingerbread but I still enjoy the experience of decorating, but building gingerbread houses is kind of a pain. An alternative to that could be decorating gingerbread man.
A popular Christmas or holiday activity and one that my friends and family do every now and then, which is white elephant. A fun gift exchange with a twist. White elephant, also known as Yankee Swap or Dirty Santa, is played with a group of family members or friends. Each player must bring a wrapped gift, then players draw numbers to determine what order they will go, players then sit in a circle surrounding the gifts. The first player picks from the gift pile and opens it. The following players can choose to either pick an unwrapped gift from the pool or steal a previous player’s gift. Anyone who gets their gift stolen in this way can do the same, choose a new gift or steal from someone else.
These are only a few of the fun and exciting activities to do during the holiday season. Friends and family are sure to enjoy doing something rather than sitting around and wishing Santa would come sooner.