“Crackers!” said Dumbledore enthusiastically, offering the end of a large silver noisemaker to Snape, who took it reluctantly.”

Home ed has gone out the window a little this week, and we've decided to focus the week on Christmas craft. If I'm honest we were in the Christmas wind down zone a couple of weeks back and it seems like all our other Home Ed buddies are feeling the same. With a list of things that Opeie wants to make he decided to kick off the week with home made Christmas crackers for the tree. I disappeared upstairs looking for patterned paper to use and while rummaging I found some Doctor who magazines that had the perfect pages in to make Christmas crackers fit for a Timelord.

Becci had brought Opeie a selection of cardboard tubes round over the last few weeks (that boy loves a cardboard tube). So we cut one of the tubes down so that we could support the main body of the crackers, folded the ends of the paper and cut in diamonds into the fold for where the ribbon would be tied. Then we unfolded and rolled the paper around the tube (nice and easy).

We had picked up a roll of Harry Potter wrapping paper a few days back that Opeie had spotted in a shop and as soon as we started making the crackers he told me that he wanted to make the hats with that, So much better than the hats that you usually get in crackers.

Opeie had the time of his life writing the jokes (which obviously I wasn't allowed to see) so I'll be looking forward to hearing those on Christmas Day. All that was left to do was to find something fun to put inside them and we came up with a pretty lovely idea, but I can't reveal it on here because our Christmas guest will be reading.

The crackers were a nice easy activity to kickstart a week of Christmas fun and its already making us  feel a little more festive.