The smell of Christmas is in the air and, I don’t know about you, but I am super excited. For many, 2021 may not have been the year you hoped it would be, and so we’re really leaning into the Christmas cheer this year and diving into decorations, carols, delicious food, family time, and plenty of peace and love - yes, even in November!

MiniZoo has several ways to help you decorate and celebrate this year, with craft activities, advent calendars, ready made decorations and DIY projects.

Let Them Play has a great range of wooden Christmas story scene play pieces including Christmas trees, presents, gingerbread man, gingerbread house, and a bunch of Australian animals in Christmas hats. They also have a DIY wooden decoration painting set, which comes with 8 pieces including a reindeer, gingerbread man, star, bauble, stocking, Santa, tree and house, as well as some paints, ready for you to make them your own and then hang on your own tree this year.

Let Them Play also have released Christmas stampers which are perfect for Christmas craft and DIY decorations. This year we have experimented with making some out of plasticine clay and we’re pretty happy with the result. Plus, the kids loved the activity - bonus!

If you love horses, each year Breyer releases a range of Christmas ornaments and this year did not disappoint. Add a beautiful horse themed ornament to your Christmas tree and it will help to make your tree shine.

Holztiger offers many options to create a nativity set up with beautifully carved wooden figures, including Mary, Joseph and the wise men. You can easily add whichever barn animals to the scene too and teach your little ones and reflect upon the true meaning of Christmas.

There’s also advent calendars and these fly out the door so you need to be quick. Schleich, CollectA, Playmobil, Breyer offer these with exciting pieces to open up each day in December. Let Them Play have also released a wooden tree with sweet hanging numbers for the dates so you can count down with ease and excitement, which allows you to reuse it each year.

If you’ve missed out on any of these, or you just love your MiniZoo animal figurines and want to use them in your decorating, then there are plenty of ways to do this. We have played with the Science and Nature Keychains this year and transformed them into tree ornaments. We wrapped up the metallic chain with festive ribbon and even hung our favourite regular animal models on the tree with Christmas hats made from air-drying plasticine, which was a lot of fun too. 

Whichever way you like to decorate and celebrate, we hope you have a truly magical Christmas, reconnecting with loved ones after lockdowns, and all stay happy and healthy during the holiday period.

Jenna @ MiniZoo