Holiday Spirit: DIY Paper Village

 A staple decoration at both my mom's and my grandma's house for the holidays is the Christmas village.  My sister and I were always in charge of setting it up, making sure all the houses were lit and the trees would stand up.  Of course now that I'm living away from home, I needed my own holiday village...so I made it and you can too.  I came across the idea of using paper on Country Home, where the also supplied the basic building templates.

Materials:
- thick card stock
- ruler
- utility knife
- pencil
- wax or parchment paper
- glue stick
- building templates
- tea light candles and votive holders/jars
- pine cones or other embellishments

How to make it:
1. Print and cut out the buildings.  I added about 1 inch to the bottom of the building so the extra flaps could be glued together for stability, you don't want the buildings being knocked over by a cat tail and set your real house on fire, not cool! Because my card stock was really thin I cut out the template then traced everything on to a fresh piece of card stock.  I was a lot more work, so I recommend just using heavier paper to begin with!

2. Glue a piece of parchment or waxed paper to the back side (the grid side) of the buildings to make the windows and doors more opaque.  Flip over to the front of the buildings and add little embellishments to make them more unique.  If you want a little more colour in your village, why not use coloured pens or markers to add Christmas lights or wreaths cut from coloured paper.  You could even cut out the shapes of people to glue to the parchment paper, then when the houses are lit it looks like there are people in the houses.

3. Fold  on the dotted lines and make sure to really press down hard on your folds. To make the buildings a little more stable, cut the extra flap that we added at the fold lines as shown in one of the above pictures.  With the sides folded back glue the smaller flaps to the larger bottom flaps to create a boxy bottom.

I also added some pine cone trees to my scene by cutting a styrofoam ball in half and digging out a little hole for the pine cone to sit it. Hot glue it to keep it in place.  Light them up with some tea lights in votive holders. Make sure the flame is no where near the actual paper, just in case!

If gingerbread is more your style, follow the directions for the Paper Gingerbread Village over at Family Fun using brown paper lunch bags.

This Christmas village has definitely become one of my favourte holiday decorations, now I'll just have to figure out how to store it the rest of the year so that it won't get crumpled.   What would you say is YOUR favourite holiday decoration?