Keeping the spirit of Santa during the Christmas holiday can always be a challenge. You must find ways to shop without your kids, gifts to hide, avoid conversations in front of your kids, and use different wrapping paper than Santa! Here are a few tricks to make Christmas a little more exciting helping your kids feel the magic of Santa Claus while visiting your family this year.
1. One of the easiest ways to make Santa real for your children is to act enthusiastic every time you see him. Mon
key see, monkey do! Getting excited will get your little ones excited and they will certainly miss the differences between the last Santa they saw at the other event you attended the other day.
2. Have Santa tell you know what they want for Christmas! When visiting Santa, make sure to listen in on the child(ren)'s conversation with Santa and take notes, but don't let them see you writing it down. One of my favorite ways to get information about what they want is to have them write Santa by email. I have a special email account on Google that I use for this each year. Once they send out their request I send them a thank you note and reminder to leave cookies and food for the reindeer on Christmas Eve.
3. Once you have Santa's gift purchased you need to hide in a special place. I remember when I was about 8 years old, I found the pile of gifts by accident while playing hide in seek with my 3 bothers. I was bummed but also excited to open the gift. A great fix to this put the gifts in things that aren't so accessible. For instance, my wife usually puts them in totes that you can buy from Walmart or the home Depot and she purchases through out the year but buries them under other totes in storage. No kids want to move totes, so it reduces your chances of the Christmas treasure being found.
4. A creative way to leave evidence of Santa is by leaving his foot prints. Physical evidence can go a long way with you child's imagination and feed into his excitement for Santa. I found this video on YouTube to explain how to make great boot marks trailing throughout the house. My wife loves getting crazy with the foot prints. She usually makes trails leading all over the house with little surprises for the kids to find. It's fun to watch them follow the trail. To Reinforce your Santa's presence at your house, its always a great idea to make a small surveillance video of Santa putting gifts under the tree. My wife and I work as a team on this one. She usually videos while I act the part. This year my son hopes to see Mrs. Claus this year because he heard her last year directing Santa where to put gifts.
5. When leaving a thank you note be sure to write in different hand writing than yours, drink some milk and leave a few cookies left over. On the outside you can make trails of dear in the dirt and dump milk duds so often to make it look like dear droppings. Yes, I know, but it adds to the realism of Santa arriving at your house.
Just remember, the Spirit of Santa always comes to end when you child gets older. To take away the disappointment when they discover it was you all along, put an emphasis on you guys spending time with them. Because lets face it Christmas is not about the gifts, its about the birth of life and spending time with family and Friends.
Tells us about what you do to make Christmas special
Merry Christmas from Ember Rian Portraits and please enjoy the video from UXU
