For every holiday, I make a presentation for all of my students about how we celebrate it in Canada. Back in mid-November, I had what I can only describe as an ambitious thought: I was going to make Christmas cards for the entire school. Roughly 200 of them. All with pop-up Christmas trees. I mean, I wanted something fun to go along with my Christmas presentation; we give out Christmas cards in the holiday season, and I was confident that I could achieve something ambitious. Or, at the very least, I could try.
I decided that if I was going to try for such a big task, I would organize myself and start a full month before I was due to present. I undertook this project officially on November 15, exactly a month before my Christmas presentation, which, in hindsight, was less “organized” and more “necessary for my sanity and general ability to see this project through to completion”.
The first few days were relatively simple: I cut paper into white rectangles to make the cards, and then I also cut green squares so I could make the pop-out trees. It took me a whole day to fold all of the white rectangles into cards! For the trees, I was able to simplify the process by folding each paper in half and cutting out the tree that way. This method meant that both sides of the tree mirrored each other when I unfolded them, and I only had to do half the amount of cutting. Win-win!
Once I had the setup of the cards sorted out, I headed to the local equivalent of the dollar store to find stars for my little trees and some other crafting supplies. With this in hand, I began gluing the stars to the trees and drawing tinsel on with gold and silver markers. I figured that I could make tiny, perfectly round ornaments with a hole punch, and this ended up working really well! By the end of this process, it was already December, so I was about halfway through my self-allotted deadline. At this point, I was worrying a little bit about my chances of completion, but I was determined (and my desk was already such a mess of Christmas card supplies that I didn’t want to clean it).
In any case, once the trees were all decorated, I moved on to sprucing up the cards. I had found little golden reindeer, so I glued these on along with some other decorations. Because I was making so many of the same cards, I wanted them to be at least somewhat personalized, so I decided to write each student’s name on the front of their respective card. This was fun because I attempted different fancy lettering for all of them!
Inside each card, I wrote a Merry Christmas message, and on the back, I wished the students a good break. Decorating the inside of the cards came next, and this was easily the most tedious part of the process. I was definitely questioning my own ambitiousness during more than one decorating session. This was mainly because I decided to use four different colours and a mix of both markers and pencil crayons; I have to say, I didn’t make anything easy for myself!
The final steps were the pop-up mechanics. I cut strips of scrap paper and spent one day folding them into the pop-up shape, then another day carefully gluing the trees onto them. And just like that, the cards were finally finished.
I handed the cards out as a surprise at the end of my Christmas presentation, and seeing the kids’ reactions made every late night, sore hand, and pile of paper scraps completely worth it. As a Language Assistant, the students make me feel special every single day, and I wanted to do something to make them feel special as well! And I think every student deserves lots of wishes for a great holiday. I’m glad I could be a part of providing them with that.
And yes, I would absolutely do it all again (but maybe after a short break from crafting).
Author: Brianna A.