Make your Christmas Eve Sparkle with Reindeer Dust (+ free Reindeer Dust Printable)
One of our favorite Christmas traditions is making reindeer dust on Christmas Eve. I'm sharing my free reindeer dust printable. The printable bag topper is at the very end of this post if you want to scroll and jump straight to it.
Fun, free reindeer dust printable
Some of our holiday traditions are holdovers from my childhood or my husband's childhood. There's something nostalgic and comforting about doing the things we did as children with our own children, right?
But, I don't like to be such a stick in the mud that we can't change it up or try new things from year to year. Making reindeer dust on Christmas Eve is one of our newer Christmas traditions that started our first Christmas with Zack.
For those of you who don't know my family's adoption story, you can read some of the details here. In a nutshell, my husband and I decided we didn't like the empty nest and adopted two loud toddler boys who are four months apart, and one year apart. Yeah, we're a little crazy but I do love our life.
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My boys are 13 now. They are still pretty loud but that's OK. And, while they will tell you that “Santa is for little kids” they still like these traditions and if we decided not to bust out the glitter and oatmeal, we'd hear about it.
We were stationed overseas during our first Christmas with Zack and, since we were far away from our family, we hosted a gathering at our home and invited some friends over for dinner. One of my friends told me she'd “bring the supplies to make reindeer dust.”
I had no idea what she was talking about but agreed. It sounded festive.
My friend Becky showed up with a box of various colors of glitter, a large container of oatmeal, and many plastic bags. As I soon learned, reindeer dust is oats mixed with glitter that you sprinkle on your lawn before you jump into bed on Christmas Eve. This is such a fun tradition and Becky is such a sweet friend. We haven't seen her in a while but we think of her and her family every Christmas Eve when we make our reindeer dust.
As crafts for kids go, this one is incredibly easy.
The shimmer in the glitter (yeah, I know…we all hate glitter) helps guide Santa's reindeer to your house and the oats provide a snack for the reindeer while Santa is inside doing his thing. Cute, right? If you'd rather, you can also use edible glitter, although it's not as sparkly.
And so, the reindeer dust became a tradition for us. In the past, we've made it on Christmas Eve but this year, we made it a little early and made a little extra to give out as gifts. This is a fun, easy, and inexpensive gift to make for classmates or to give as party favors.
We usually put our reindeer dust in a Ziplock baggie until it comes time to sprinkle it on our lawn. You can also use a brown paper lunch bag, which looks a lot cuter but you'll have to make extra sure to fold the top well so that the pesky glitter doesn't escape.
Who am I kidding? If you do this craft, you're going to be finding glitter in your kitchen (and pretty much everywhere else) well into the new year. Or pretty much forever.
I don't really have an exact recipe for reindeer dust. I set out oats and different colors of glitter and let my kids go to town. You can use barley instead of oats if you've got that on hand, but most people have oats in their pantry.
Santa's reindeer aren't picky.
You can also throw some sprinkles or colored sugar in the mix if you want some more color (or more mess!) I'm kidding! It's Christmas. The kids love this. What's a little bit of a mess?
Download your free reindeer dust printable here:
Just click to download and print. Have fun!
You can trim the bottom off the printable or, you can do what we did and use it to personalize, which would be super fun if you're using these as gifts or party favors, right? There's a little bit of white space on the top, which we've used to fold over the top of the bag. You can easily trim that off or add a little personal stamp or note.
Check out my Christmas hub for more festive ideas:
