8 Crafts & Activities That'll Keep the Kids Busy on Thanksgiving
If on Thanksgiving Day you're in charge of serving dinner for 18, stuffing a turkey, baking the pies, setting the table and cleaning the house, the last thing you want to worry about is occupying the kids! These fabulously fun and festive Thanksgiving Day crafts and activities will keep the kids busy and out of your hair.
Make Homemade Place Cards
Got a kid who's super-proud of her writing skills? Put her to work making place cards for the Thanksgiving table and let her choose where everybody sits. Tell them that they'll get extra dessert for designing extra-fancy (and extra time-consuming) place cards featuring multicolored turkeys, Pilgrims and American Indians.
Make Thanksgiving Centerpieces
Forget a stuffy and expensive floral arrangement: Let the kids make kooky-cute centerpieces. Grab some odd-shaped gourds when you're picking up your Thanksgiving produce or pinecones from the yard, glue, and whatever crafty scraps you can find-googly eyes, pom-poms, feathers, etc. Your guests will love feasting their eyes on the kids' creations.
Here's how to make a Turkey Gourd Centerpiece or a Pinecone Turkey Centerpiece.
Make a Personalized Thanksgiving Tablecloth
Pick up some fabric markers and sacrifice an old cloth tablecloth or bedsheet for a tablecloth that will have everyone talking. Instruct kids to write on the tablecloth all the things and people that they're thankful for. Kids that can't quite write yet can draw pictures or dictate their blessings to big kids. Leave the markers on the table during dinner so adults can add their own thanksgivings, too.
Make Butter
Homemade butter tastes heavenly, and this activity will take at least a heavenly half hour for your kids to accomplish. All you need is heavy whipping cream, some airtight containers with tight-fitting lids and some pint-size volunteers to shake it up.
Get the Homemade Butter Recipe
Create Homemade Votive Candles
Have kids old enough to handle a knife craft unique votives out of apples or those miniature pumpkins you've still got hanging around from Halloween. Use a paring knife to cut holes in the tops of the fruit and then insert a tea-light candle into each hole. (We're especially partial to the totally safe battery-operated ones.) For mere pocket change, you'll have a tablescape worthy of a home decor magazine, and the kids can proudly take all the credit.
Make the Apple or Pumpkin Votive Craft
Paint a Mural
Early American homes often had hand-painted murals on the walls of the dining rooms. Follow the tradition (but leave your walls intact) by busting out a roll of butcher paper (or heavy-duty Christmas wrap you've already bought, turned to the blank side) and all the markers, crayons, or paints in your house. The kids can create a lovely landscape that you can tape on the walls. Guests will ooh and ahh at their artwork throughout the main meal.
Find a Local Thanksgiving Day Event
Enlist another adult to get the kids out from underfoot-your partner, a relative or even a neighborhood teen who's driving her own mother crazy-and find them all something fun to do on ParentsConnect in your neighborhood. Morning Turkey Trot family runs, parades, and shelters in need of volunteers to serve meals are all great options for the kids to get some exercise, give back ... and get out of the house!
Have Your Kids to Help in the Kitchen
Well, if you can't beat 'em, let 'em join you…in the kitchen. Assign each child solo, specific tasks to cut down on fights and keep them focused. Mixing a salad, putting rolls in baskets and putting napkins on the table are all assignments even very young kids can handle. Big kids can be put on potato-peeling duty or they can make a kid-friendly recipe that they're entirely responsible for. Kids in the kitchen may cause chaos, but that's what Thanksgiving's all about, right? Chaos. Um, we mean ... family.
