It comes home on the last Friday, held carefully in both hands or crushed at the bottom of a school bag. A paper-plate angel with one wing. A card with a handprint that’s meant to be a reindeer. A salt-dough star with a hole for the ribbon that someone pushed through with a pencil.
By Christmas Eve there are six of them. By the new year there’s glitter in the car, on the couch and, somehow, in the fridge.
And every December after that, there are more.
The best way to keep your kids’ Christmas crafts is to keep the one or two each year with the most of your child in them, like a handprint, a name in their own writing or a drawing of the family, and write down who made it, how old they were and what they said about it. Photograph or capture the rest before they go in the box. The decoration can fade. The story doesn’t have to.
Why do Christmas crafts pile up so fast?
Partly because there are so many at once. School, kindy, daycare, holiday programmes and grandparents’ houses all make Christmas things in the same few weeks.
Partly because they’re made to be used. Cards get opened, ornaments get hung, paper chains get stretched across a doorway and pulled down in January.
And partly because they’re hard to throw away. A Christmas card from a five-year-old isn’t really a card. It’s a small, glittery record of what they thought Christmas was that year.
None of that means you have to keep all of them.
Which Christmas crafts are worth keeping?
Three questions help.
Is there more of your child in it than of the craft kit?
A pre-cut foam tree with stickers says less about your child than a lopsided drawing of the whole family in Santa hats. Keep the ones where you can see their hand: their writing, their colours, their idea of what a reindeer looks like.
Does it show how big they were?
Handprints and footprints are the obvious keepers, because they show size in a way nothing else does. In a few years, a handprint from the year they were three will look impossibly small.
Would you be glad to find it in ten years?
Not "is it good". Glad. If picturing it coming out of the decorations box in ten years makes you smile, it stays.
A gentle rule of thumb: one or two originals a year, and the rest saved another way.
What should you do with the Christmas cards kids make for you?
The cards are often the best thing they make all year, because they’re the one craft made for one person.
- Keep the inside, not just the front. The front is usually the craft. The inside is them: the spelling, the signature, the row of kisses that goes on a bit too long.
- Note who it was for. A card to Grandma and a card to you tell different stories, and in ten years it’s easy to forget which was which.
- Write the year on the back. In pencil, small, in a corner. It takes five seconds.
- Keep them flat and together. One envelope or folder per Christmas works well. A shoebox of loose cards turns into a guessing game later.
How do you keep handprint and footprint keepsakes?
These are the pieces most families end up wishing they’d kept, so they’re worth a little more care.
- Keep the original if you can. Paint on card lasts well if it stays flat and out of the sun.
- Salt-dough handprints need dry storage. They soften in damp air. Wrap them in tissue and keep them in a box indoors, not in the garage.
- Save it with its size. A photo can make a handprint look any size. A ruler or a coin beside it in the photo helps. A 3D capture keeps the real dimensions, so you can see later just how small it was.
- Write down the age. "Handprint, age 3" turns a nice decoration into a record.
How do you store the Christmas decorations they made?
For the ones that come out every year:
- Give them their own box. A small, labelled box inside the decorations box stops them being crushed by baubles.
- Wrap each one. Tissue paper or a tea towel. Salt dough and paper plates don’t like being squashed.
- Label the underside. Their name, the year and what it is (their name for it, not yours).
- Let them hang it themselves. Part of keeping a decoration is the yearly moment of finding it again. That’s what it’s for.
Paper chains, glitter pictures and anything held together with sticky tape usually won’t survive a second year. Those are the best ones to photograph and let go.
Save the story before January
The craft is the easy part to keep. The story is the part that disappears.
Within a week or two, most children can still tell you what they made and why. By the next Christmas, they won’t remember, and neither will you. Ask while it’s fresh:
- What is it?
- Who did you make it for?
- What was the best bit to make?
Write the answers down, or record them in your child’s own voice. "It’s an angel, but she’s a dog angel" is worth more than any amount of glitter.
How Keepsake can help
Keepsake is for the story as much as the object. For each Christmas craft or card, you can:
- Save it as artwork, a card or an object. On an iPhone with a LiDAR scanner, ornaments and salt-dough pieces can be saved in 3D, so you can turn them with a finger later.
- Add the story: who made it, how old they were, who it was for and what they said about it.
- Add a voice note, so you keep how they said it. One voice note per keepsake is free; listening back is always free.
- Put it in a Christmas Memory Box, so next December you can open it and see last year’s again.
Your keepsakes live in your own iCloud, not on a public platform.
Next December
Most of the glitter will be gone by February. The paper chain will be in the recycling. The one-winged angel might make it another year or two.
But next December, when the decorations box comes down, there’ll be a small box inside it with a few things that made it. And somewhere, a note in your handwriting: a dog angel, age four, made for Grandma.
