Plan meaningful holiday kitchen grandparenting experiences that your grandchildren will remember you for.

Show your grandchildren the festive hospitality side of you. Decorate a tablescape for the holiday season with help from them.

Plan your grandchildren’s visit with fun activities and yummy food recipes that they can help you make.


For instance, my husband and I started a new thing with our grandchildren.

They take turns to come to our place for a visit. Then they can all come together after they’ve each had their turn. When they come alone, they get to pick out where they want to eat if we go out.

Fun in the Kitchen

We do eat out at two of our favorite restaurants (the kids’ favorites that we also love). But they really have fun helping in the kitchen.

Pancakes always makes it to the top of the breakfast choices. Whether it’s stirring the pancake mix with an egg and the milk or flipping over the pancakes, they love helping.

Baking Cookies

Your grandkids will love helping you with baking cookies for Christmas – when you turn them loose in the kitchen. Give them an apron, let them mix the batter, roll the cookie dough, cut out cookies, and place them on the cookie sheet.

Little ones may not place cookies far enough apart. But that’s okay. They enjoy the freedom to be the baker. And the cookies come out with crazy and fun shapes.

Cookies
Baking Cookies with Little Granddaughters

Shopping with Grandchildren

Taking your grandchildren shopping will give them something to look forward to after they’ve spent time in the kitchen.

When we go shopping, we let them choose a toy. The trip is all about the focus being on them. But it’s also an opportunity for us to get to know what they like.

You don’t have to buy toys every time you take your grandchildren shopping, of course. It’s very easy to spoil them.

Set Limits

Set limits on prices of toys. Tell your grands how much they can spend while they stay with you. They won’t always like it, but it teaches them good values of life such as:

  • Saving money
  • Making choices
  • Learning to be content with what you have

Decorating the Christmas Tree

Kids have fun the Christmas tree and listening to Christmas music while munching on cookies that they got to make.

For this Christmas season, I set up the Christmas tree, added the lights, and turned over the decorating to our grandchildren. It’s so fun to watch how they put the ornaments on. There’ll be clusters of the same color ornaments together.

You can’t be OCD with tree ornament placement, or this activity will absolutely crazy. But I love it because they get to experience decorating the Christmas tree however they decide – and it doesn’t have to look like grandma’s tree perfection of ornaments.

Decorate a Tablescape with Christmas Trees

It’s easy to find different styles of mini Christmas trees that you can decorate a tablescape with. Shop at Hobby Lobby or evening at thrift stores.

Two of these little trees (purchased at a thrift store) only cost about $2 each.

Mini Christmas trees
Mini Tree Tablescape

Meaningful Christmas Season Activities to Do with Grandchildren

Do meaningful activities with your grandchildren when they visit during the Christmas season like:

  1. going to museums
  2. taking them to a park
  3. taking them on an early evening walk in a park, downtown, or neighborhood that is lit with Christmas lights
  4. baking cookies together and wrapping some in a festive package then delivering the package to a relative, friend, or neighbor
  5. decorating your house with Christmas lights and decorations

Picnic Lunch

Cook some chicken, and make chicken salad sandwiches to pack in a picnic lunch to take on your Christmas activity outings.

My little four-year-old granddaughter and I took a lunchbox with chicken sandwiches, chips, water, and juice box to the zoo. We ate our picnic lunch at a table where the giraffes were. It was so much fun.

Zoo picnic
Picnic Lunch by Giraffes at the Zoo
Giraffes
Giraffes

Chicken Sandwiches for a Picnic Lunch

Chicken Salad with Avocado Mayonnaise

Chicken salad with avocado mayo and bread and butter pickles

Course Snack
Cuisine American
Keyword chicken
Prep Time 15 minutes
Total Time 15 minutes
Servings 2

Ingredients

  • 1 Chicken breast
  • 2 Tablespoons Avocado Oil Mayonnaise
  • 3 slices Bread and butter pickles
  • 1 Stick Celery
  • 1 Tablespoon Sweet Onion, sliced thin

Instructions

  1. Boil chicken breasts ahead of time and refrigerate.

  2. Mash the chicken into small pieces, and mix in the mayonnaise.

  3. Slice the pickles real fine and mix in with the chicken and mayo.

  4. Cut one celery stick into real fine pieces and add to the chicken mixture.

  5. Add the onions.

  6. Put mayo on the bread slices, and cut into fourths.

    Sandwich

Recipe Notes

Use pickle relish and any other mayonnaise if you don’t have bread and butter pickles or avocado oil mayo. 

 

Chicken salad sandwiches will vary according to your grandchildren’s food preferences.

This recipe includes a little onion and was not my granddaughter’s favorite sandwich. But she likes chicken and was excited to eat the sandwiches because it was a picnic lunch.

Actually, I was out of pickle relish and sandwich spread. So I used what I had on hand. The only thing I had to buy was the bread.

Kids will usually be happy simply with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But use whatever you have for the picnic. Remember, it’s all about making the experience meaningful.

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