Nothing says Christmas like some marshmallow crafts

The girls and I planned a light, fluffy day after Thanksgiving, and it involved plenty of marshmallows (which I don’t eat, by the way, because who on earth would eat those things when there are Hershey’s Kisses to be had?!). Anyhow, first we gathered our materials for the crafting:

The stuff: Multicolored toothpicks, big and small marshmallows, orange TicTacs, a tube of white frosting, mini chocolate chips, fruit roll, Hershey’s Kisses (get two bags right off that bat, because if you’re anything like me you’ll eat an entire bag and be ticked off that you have to go back to the store to restock), pretzel sticks, paper towels, and kitchen shears.

Now from that list of stuff, you can just go hog wild with the Christmas crafts and create all manner of festive (and edible) decorations. We chose to make snowman ornaments and star ornaments for our tree.

Snowman Ornament Instructions: To make a snowman, first get a couple of toothpicks and jam them through three marshmallows to hold your snowman body together. Then break a pretzel stick in half and push the halves into the middle of your snowman to form arms.

Poke an eye hole with a toothpick, then put a glob of icing on the pointy end of a mini chocolate chip and push it into the hole to make an eye. Repeat for the other eye. Do the same for the nose, but use an orange TicTac.

Cut a long, thin strip of fruit roll, fringe the ends, then wrap it around the snowman’s neck and twist to make a nifty scarf. I only bought cherry fruitroll, and wish I had picked up a few more colors to add some variety to our snow people. Next time I’ll get a few of those horrid-looking green and blue fruit rolls too.

I tasted the cherry fruit roll, but there’s no way I’ll taste that blue stuff. I know two little folks who will, though... Ree thoroughly enjoyed the fruity delight:

And I don’t even know how many marshmallows Ro ate. Every time I turned around she looked like this:

Use a gob of icing to stick a Hershey’s Kiss hat on the little dude. And make some buttons the same way you did the eyes. Then let them dry. Voila, snow people! I think they came out really cute! Ree’s is on the left, mine is in the middle, and Ro’s is on the right:

We’re going to use a needle and some dental floss to add hanging hoops so we can put them on the tree.

Christmas Star-like Thingamajigs: Next we went all freeform and decided to make, ummmm, for lack of a better descriptor let’s call them Christmas Stars. Yeah that’s it. Heh. Probably don’t even need to say what we did, right?

I sort of went for the minimalist approach:

Ro was kind of in the middle with the amount of marshmallows she used:

And Ree, well Ree clearly went down the “more is better” avenue. That thing is actually heavy.

Lopsided and funny looking for sure, but definitely endearing. And, most importantly, we had oodles of fun and they’ll look really cute on our tree.

Cheers, and happy Christmas prep! (Alrighty, who has the tree up already? Come on, spill it. I’d love to be one of those families who gets the lights on the house as soon as the turkey is cleaned up, but the reality is that we’re kind of late-December decorators by the time we get our act together...)