Christmas for me, besides the obvious reason, is about memories and creating new memories for my son! One thing I remember growing up was making homemade Christmas ornaments with my mom and sisters using an old fashioned salt dough recipe. My mom was always such the crafter – and if it could be made by hand, she did it.

Here’s a fun and super easy salt dough recipe that you can use to make homemade Christmas ornaments! All you need is all-purpose flour, salt, water, and cookie cutters! Ohh, and cinnamon if you’d like to make them darker in color and smell yummy too! We make them both ways…with and without.

 

Ingredients:

• 4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup salt
• 1 and 1/2 cups warm water
• Cinnamon (optional. Just start with a little and keep adding and mixing until you get the desired color.)

Directions:

Combine flour (and optional cinnamon) and salt together and mix well in a large mixing bowl. Then slowly add the warm water and mix with a large spoon. After I mix it as good as I can with the spoon, I go in with my hands mixing and kneading until it’s all soft and combined really well. Flour your workspace (I just put it straight on my counter) and then plop the dough onto the flour. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough flat until it’s about 1/8″ thick.

Start cutting shapes out with your cookie cutters. I have several that I’ve used that were my moms. Spray a cookie sheet with spray and place your cut out shapes on it, then use the end of a paper clip or a tooth pick to make holes where you want the ribbon or string placed. I kind of swirled the paper clip around until I got the hole as big as I wanted it.

Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour or until they’re hard. Let them cool, decorate with paint and then you can paint them with a clear coat to preserve them.

 

After they’ve dried, add some string or ribbon and decorate your tree. You could also use some ornament hooks if you have some leftover. I usually have a few in the bottom of the box that I keep all of my ornaments in.

**When you’re putting up your tree, ornaments, and decorations, make sure to put these in a nice dry place. They can mold if stored in a place with alot of moisture.

Will you be making homemade ornaments with your kids?