Santa Role Play: Decorate a Santa Bag and Give Toys

This is a great Christmas activity for kids to get them into the spirit of giving

Some thoughts

• I hope in a couple of years Big A understands that the true meaning of charity/donation is NOT just giving away toys that she doesn’t care for anymore.

• I hope she will realize that giving away something she truly cherishes just to make someone else happy on a special day like Christmas is the actual meaning of donation.

• I hope that the next time we do this exercise we will be parting with toys she loves so that those very same toys will brighten another kid’s day

Having said all that, this year we will not be trudging the water of “true charity”. This year we will only be donating toys we don’t play with anymore. Parting with toys does not come easy to any child. However as a parent, I felt the need to address a common problem these days : over -indulgence. Still, there are always a big set of toys which get ignored among the sought-after pile of toys. Ironically, you will still have a big episode on your hands when you even remotely mention giving them away. When the kids don’t take care of their belongings, I have used the common reasoning old school parents ( including my own) have used. The fact that there are kids without even basic needs. May be it it is wrong, but that’s what we do and it has in the recent past piqued her curiosity. We have gone from no-reaction to follow up questions about kids without basic needs.She was very surprised and couldn’t fathom the fact that there are some kids without any toys. I took this opportunity to teach her about gratefulness and thankfulness of what they posses.

To make giving away some of her belongings fun, we did the following activity.

The kids decorated their “Santa bag. It is a large cloth bag which I set out along with some sparkly pom poms, pipe cleaners and foam shapes. The girls had a fun time sticking pom poms and pipe cleaners to the bag and stapled the foam shapes. Then with their hats on ( Santa for the older one and reindeer for the younger one) they went around the house and through their old boxes looking for toys they want to give away. Baby A did not understand what was about to happen. She just assumed she was playing a game with her older sister. Dressing up and pretending to be Santa did get my kid into the mood of giving. After collecting all the toys in her Santa bag, she ran around the time singing “Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is coming to town” while dropping all the toys into the donation box. By now she was excited about giving away toys and pretending to be Santa was major fun. We dropped out Santa Bag into our toy donation box. Visit the following links to learn more about your local toy drives. I have seen bins even at chain stores and toy stores. Related Links: Toys for Tots The Salvation Army For a comprehensive list of toy drives please visit this link.

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