It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas crafts!

Someone really oughta tame my Yuletide fever, it's not even December yet.

Nah, scratch that, I'm gonna wave my festive freak flag and wave it high.

Grab your green pipe cleaners and red cotton poofballs people, it's Christmas Craft Time!

I'm the kind of mom that saves every piece of artwork, every scribbled-on napkin, anything that my kids have created you can bet makes its way into their art bin. I'm a sucker for crafts that can take a small snapshot of where the kids are at on this journey of theirs. Which is why, when I stumbled upon paperbag minibooks, I knew it would be awesome.

The end result is a super easy, totally adorable Christmas minibook made out of paper lunch bags and some Christmas crafts.

To make one minibook all you need is 2 paper lunch bags, Christmas embellishments (stickers, decals, stamps and festive ribbons) photos, paint, markers and some modge podge to seal all of it. In fact, I made a point to save all the Holiday cards we received last year and repurposed them for this craft. You can get so many cute labels and embellishments from leftover cards!

To make the book structure, I followed all the instructions from this website. Next I gathered some of our best Christmas photos, shrunk them to about 1-2 inches and printed them out. I didn't even need to print on glossy photo paper because you'll ultimately add a layer of glossy Mod Podge, so it didn't matter.

Then we proceeded to make a huge mess all over the table as we cut the pictures and stickers and began gluing all over the pages.

I ended up having to do this project in stages, mainly because I don't have that much patience. 

Did you see that mess?

 Sooooo, after a short sanity break, we painted around the pictures.

The final stage was having the girls write down what the pictures made them feel. 

I adore that Bella wrote comfy. See that above picture with the sweaters? In that moment they were singing the Old Navy jingle "I love my comfy sweaters" from 2 seasons ago :) 

Since there are two bags for each book, there are 2 little pockets that are perfect for a little surprise. Here I have a little string with the letters J-O-Y taped on the inside that can get tucked back in. Cute huh? You could put anything in there, a little note, another picture. So many possibilities. 

For added durability I painted glossy ModPodge all over the pages. They are perfect coffee table books for this season and for many more to come!

Happy Holidays!