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Kids Crafty Christmas Tree

We did it!

We built our very own cardboard Christmas tree!  It was totally fun, totally messy, and totally worth it!!  Taking the kids outside to play was not happening today.  It’s gotten way too cold for my liking.  So, I got my creative thinking cap on, and thought, let’s build a Christmas tree!!  I knew it could go completely wrong, but I wanted to try anyway; and I’m glad we did!  We love it.

It looks like a risky idea for those with littler ones, I know.   But the moments when they’re just walking around the tree a million times with yarn; or sticking a million bobbles or stickers on, one-by-one, it’s really pretty manageable; as those steps take so long.  Clearly, there is no exact science to this, but I’ll show you how we went about doing it.   It’s more simple than you might think.


  1.  2 medium-big cardboard boxes
  2.  All the crafty stuff you can find around your house.
  3.  Packaging tape.
  4.  Glue.
  5.  Scissors.

Step 1:  Break down your boxes, cutting them along all the folds, so you have a stack of squares to use.


Step 2:  Take your biggest four squares, a cut them into triangles.  (You can see in the photo above, how I drew the triangle first).


Step 3:  Tape the triangles together, and form them into a pyramid.

Step 4:  Take the next size smaller four squares, and do the same as step 3.  Be sure the base of these next triangles, are much narrower than the prvious ones.  (See pictures below).

Step 5:  I did the same thing one more time, with even narrower, but long triangles, to make it tall.  The key is that, each step has to be narrower than the step before.  In other words, as you can see in the pictures, the base of the tree is wider than the base of the second story, which is wider than the base of the top story.  Each story just has to be more narrow than the one before it.  No exact science, beyond that.

Step 6:  Now that you have all three stories stacked, tape them together, so they don’t fall over.


Step 7:  Now you’re ready to decorate!!  To keep things in control, I would just give them one element to decorate with at a time.  We started, by wrapping yarn around it.  This was great!  I taped the ends at the top.  One had red, one had green, and they went around and around and around……

….. and around and around…. until we thought that was finally enough.  They were already having fun! And it was totally in control.

Step 8:  We did the same with red and white streamers after that.

Step 9:  We happened to have tinsel, so we stuck it on the top with glue.  Pretty messy, but a short step.

Step 10:  Next, we cut a bunch of small triangles out of the cardboard scraps.  I would apply glue to them one by one, as I passed them to the kids to sprinkle the glitter on.

Step 11:  We went over to the tree and carefully stuck on the triangles.  Again, I’m always in charge of the glue (we don’t have the luxury of an art room, and these kids are little), so they would pass me the triangles, and I would glue them onto the tree, mostly at the bottom.

Step 12:  Now, the fuzzy bobbles!  I would dab a dot of glue on them and they would stick them on the tree.  We used all the bobbles we had.  This step can go on for a nice amount of time.   (Ahhh, calm, cool and collected… happy mom feelings ….. as they stick the millions of bobbles on, one-by-one.  Always good during projects like these.  These tasks that take a while, give you that!  The yarn step was the same way).   Anything that you have zillions of, that they can stick on  … do that!

Step 13:  The star was made by gluing two small triangles together, upside down from each other.  Then we glued and glittered it.

Step 14:  To apply the star to the tree, we took a toilet paper roll and taped it on to the top of the tree.  The we cut a slit on either side of the star, so it could slip onto the roll as you see below.

 That’s it, we’re done!  They can’t wait to surprise Daddy with it, when he gets home!!  And I’m so excited we actually have a Christmas tree now!   We’re totally using it as one too!

Merry Christmas!!!

Here’s to great kid fun, on cold winter days

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