Christmas Cooking with Kids

Christmas cooking with kids can be a great way to introduce your children to the joys of the kitchen, as well as allowing you to spend some quality time with them over the holiday period. The Christmas season is all about getting family and friends together to celebrate and often children feel left out as adults enjoy spending time with friends who they might not have seen for a while. The Holidays also tends to be about food, so combining this with your child's need for your attention will make for an enjoyable activity all round.

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Why Cooking?

Beyond the practical use of having another pair of hands around the kitchen, Christmas cooking with kids can teach them a lot of useful life skills:

• Empathy - By making food that other people will enjoy, your child has to put themselves into someone else's shoes for a while, which will help them in their relationships with their friends.


• Math - Christmas cooking usually involves a lot of baking, which requires a lot of careful measuring and weighing. This attention to detail, ratios and numbers will help your child's mathematical development.


• Maturity - For years, your child will expect food to magically appear on the table when they are hungry, so by cooking with them, you are showing them the time and effort that people put into their dinner. You can also use it as a springboard to get them to cook a meal for the family.

Make sure that you keep the focus on fun, as these kinds of skills will be picked up subconsciously by your child's brain. Turning it into a lesson may turn them off cooking. So many more benefits of cooking with kids.

What to Cook?

Christmastime offers its own set of unique recipes and holiday specific foods. If you've never done Christmas cooking with kids before, you'll be better off getting their attention by making things with which they are familiar. Once they show an interest in the kitchen, you can begin to increase the complexities of the dishes you're making.

Sweet Foods

Christmas seems to be fueled by sugar, and there are dozens of holiday-themed baked goods that are easy to make with children:

• Sugar cookies. The smell of cookies through the house will be truly festive, and if you allow them to dry out, they can double as decorations for the tree. (see our dough ornament recipes here.)


• Christmas baking is a favorite this time of year. Think beyond cookies and try, breakfast casseroles, cakes, rolls, quick breads, etc.


• Gingerbread Christmas trees. Make a traditional gingerbread house or create various size stars into a tree.


• Cinnamon rolls. They are a staple of the Christmas breakfast throughout the states, and your child will love having something that they have made on the table for everyone to share. If you make them on the morning itself, it will help use up some of your child’s energy! One year we even laid the cinnamon rolls out on a cookie sheet in the shape of a tree and frosted with green frosting.

Savory Dishes

For those looking for more of a challenge with their Christmas cooking for kids, savory dishes require a lot more time and effort to put together, but the end result of a fully-prepared meal is incredibly satisfying. To get your child into non-dessert dishes try:

• Pretzels
• Turkey pie, pasta, salad or any other way of encouraging them to use up leftover meat.
• Mashed potato in the shape of snowmen

For those looking for the ultimate Christmas cooking challenge, try enlisting your child as your chef's assistant as you prepare the full Christmas dinner. Jobs like peeling vegetables and mixing sauces will make them feel important, like they've contributed to the day.

Above all, if you do try Christmas cooking with kids, make sure that you accept whatever comes out of the oven as being a work of love, rather than a work of art. By introducing your child to the kitchen, you can help give them a life-long love of cooking, which will soon disappear if you're worrying too much about taste and presentation.

Christmas Cooking with Kids Resources

Candy

Christmas Candy Recipes
Homemade Chocolates
Homemade Fudge Recipes
Homemade Suckers
Chocolate Bark Recipes
Homemade chocolate truffles

Cookies

Christmas Cookie Recipes
Gingerbread House Recipes
Cookie Swap

Gifts and For Fun

Food Gift Ideas
Dough Ornaments
Edible Gift Baskets
Jar Mixes
Strawberry Santas
Reindeer Theme Recipes
Orange & Cloves Decoration
12 Christmas Cooking Activities

Christmas Printable Fun Games!

Christmas Theme Crafts- Edible and just for decoration.

Printable Games, Coloring Sheets, and More  

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