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Archive for the ‘Family Activities’ Category

by Annie Sullivan

Holidays are a great time to make memories and bring your family closer by doing fun family activities. Holiday activities that promote family bonding do not have to be incredibly detailed or expensive either. In fact, holiday decorating is a great way to bond as a family while making memories that will last a lifetime. The last three months of every year has 3 major holidays that are great opportunities to make some family bonding fun times!

October – Halloween

Halloween is a fun time of year for both kids and adults. It is also a great time of year to let your creativity shine! Decorating a pumpkin can be a lot of fun and it can also be team building activity. While many families choose to purchase a pumpkin for each child in the family, other families choose to purchase one family pumpkin to carve. Instead of just picking out a pumpkin at the local grocery store, consider taking your family to a pumpkin patch and spending some time looking over the pumpkins before choosing the “perfect” one. After your family has chosen the family pumpkin, you will need to agree on how to decorate your pumpkin. Some families choose to paint their pumpkin while other families carve their pumpkin. If you carve your pumpkin, you may want to roast the seeds for a great snack. You can further help to promote family bonding by watching a fun Halloween movie together after carving your pumpkin. For example, “It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” is a classic Halloween movie that some families watch year after year.

November – Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time of year when many people gather with their extended families to share a meal and focus on being thankful. Creating a list of things for which you are thankful can be a great family bonding activity. You can write your items on a slip of paper that you can keep in a jar, or you can create a garland to hang in the house. In order to create a garland, you can trace the hand of one family member and cut out a number of the hand prints. Then, each person can write down several things for which they are thankful. You can string the hand prints together or glue them together to make a wreath. After the holiday is over, you can save the prints for the following year in order to remember the wonderful things that happened as well as to compare the years.

In addition to creating “thankful lists”, you can also work on making creative placemats for the holiday table. In order to do this, you will need construction paper, craft materials, and clear contact paper. Each family member can create a placemat using the materials of his or her choice. After the place mat is created, simply cover both sides with clear contact paper in order to make the placemat waterproof. Trim the excess contact paper from the construction paper. Placemats can also be saved from year to year too.

December – Christmas

There are so many different family bonding activities for Christmas that it can be overwhelming to just pick one or two. One suggestion is to pick one activity and then make it a yearly tradition. For example, some families choose to spend a day during the season finding the perfect Christmas tree. Instead of just throwing decorations on the tree, take the time as a family to choose a theme and create the decorations to go with that theme. You may try an organic theme and create your own decoration from popcorn and cranberries or pine cones.

Although these family bonding suggestions may seem simple, they actually do work. As you decorate your way through the holiday, you will be strengthening your relationships with your kids and your spouse as well as making fun memories that will last a lifetime.

Author Annie Sullivan enjoys the holidays and loves to coordinate the decorating of her office building by visiting Santa’s Quarters for beautiful artificial trees and unique commercial Christmas decorations.

by Jon Quinton

Planning and budgeting your family holiday can be quite hard to get right as there are always unexpected costs that creep into the equation. I think most families will be familiar with the feeling of coming back from their trip having overspent. When money is tight, the last thing you want to be doing is spending months trying to catch up on the money you spent whilst you were on holiday. Not only can this be stressful, it can also ruin the happy feeling your holiday created. We all know that we should budget for holidays, but how many people actually break down their expected costs to a daily amount to see if their projections are realistic?

Always Over Plan

The first rule to planning your holiday budget is to plan for overspending. Be over cautious when planning how much you are likely to spend on a daily basis, having spare cash is much better than having no cash! It’s much easier to do this if you’ve been to a particular destination before, but if this is a first visit then try to understand the currency and do a bit of research online to find out the average cost of everything.

Travel Expenses

This is probably the easiest thing to budget for, as travel costs and the cost of the holiday itself is usually fairly black and white. However, you’ll need to be aware that the advertised cost is usually different to the price you end up paying. Most travel companies and airlines will add on extras such as taxes, transfers, airport parking and so on. Soon enough, your bargain holiday might not seem like such a good deal. To get an accurate idea of cost, try not to rely on the advertised rate. Instead, work through the booking process until you get the final cost. That way, you’ll know exactly what you’ll be spending.

Food and Drink

This is one of the areas that most families will overspend on. This is mainly down to the fact that it can be so hard to plan for as food costs will vary from place to place. The best thing you can do is allow a generous amount of food and drink budget per day, and then if you have extra left at the end you’ll be able to give yourself a little bonus. Be careful of eating out at restaurants all the time as this will really rack up your food and drink bill. Instead, why not visit some supermarkets and buy some picnic food for lunch?

Clothes

If you need to buy clothes before you go away, then this should also be added into your budget. Quite often you’ll find that the kids need new swimwear, or you might need some new trainers or t-shirts. The same rule applies for items such as sun lotion, hats, sunglasses or anything else you might need to purchase prior to your holiday. If you’re buying things for the whole family then the costs can easily mount up. It might be worth spreading this cost out a little bit by buying things a month or so in advance, leaving that little bit more cash to spend on ice cream!

Activities

Everyone wants to have fun on their holiday, but if you’re paying for fun activities everyday then you might find yourself in a little bit of financial trouble. If you’re going to a popular tourist destination then you’ll find plenty of tempting things to keep your family entertained, the problem is that they will all come with a certain price tag. Entrance tickets to attractions like zoos, water parks and nature reserves all cost money. As with the food budget, it could be worth setting aside a certain amount of money each day for activities and tourist attractions.

As there will always be unexpected costs, and of course nothing ever goes 100% to plan it’s also worth setting aside some cash for miscellaneous costs. Hopefully though, this plan will help you budget effectively for your next family holiday!

Jon Quinton writes for a number of different people and currently works for Wish.co.uk selling unique gifts, spa days and experience adventures.