Thanks to Oriental Trading Company for inviting us to review its holiday products.
By Amy Holmes for Fairfax Family Fun
I love Christmas! The gifts, the parties, the holiday shows and great anticipation. Each year, I place an order with Oriental Trading Company to help me decorate for the holiday! Here are some of the things I ordered and recommend this year.
Gift bags and small gifts
My daughters, ages 11 and 10, are active members in their respective Girl Scout troops. My oldest daughter is in charge of leading the troop meeting this week and wanted to give her fellow troop members a small gift. Oriental Trading Company provided the perfect solution for a thoughtful and meaningful gift for each girl.
First, we started with gift bags. We opted for two gift bags options which provided for a fun craft night for our family. We assembled reindeer bags and ugly sweater reindeer, snowman and penguin bags. We had a great time assembling and crafting these bags one evening as we wound down from the end of a long day. I highly recommend this craft as it is fun, easy, cute, practical and useful.
Note: With the reindeer only option, be sure to add glue dots to your order for easy assembly. The ugly sweater gift bags don’t require the glue dots as the attachments have sticky backs. We filled the bags with small paracord bracelets, holiday themed in green and red, which are beautiful, practical and useful for scouts who might find themselves needing a rope, perfect for this active outdoors focused crew.
We discovered a set of gorgeous snowflake pins on a card that reading “Friends are like snowflakes, everyone one is beautiful and unique.” The pins are pretty and we loved the sentiment as each one of her girl scout sisters are different and contribute their unique gifts to this tight knit troop. The pins would be great on gifts from moms to their friends as well.
We also enjoyed the rhinestone snowflake charms. My daughter is a budding jewelry designer and makes choker necklaces that are popular with her friends. The rhinestone snowflake charms are perfect for her to create a choker necklace for each girl.While these gift bags were created for a Girl Scout troop, but would be perfect for a class party or children’s holiday party too!
Gifts for friends
My 10 year old daughter wanted to make her holiday card to her friends a little more special. We found these beautiful holiday bracelets that are fun and festive. She will include this sweet costume jewelry bracelet in her Christmas cards with a hand written note to each friend.
Decorations
I absolutely love Peanuts and grew up watching all of the Peanuts and Charlie Brown Holiday specials on TV. I am thrilled that they still make an appearance on tv each season, especially during Christmas. Oriental Trading Company has an entire Peanuts Christmas line of decorations, crafts, and party supplies.
As a sticker craft, we created a Happy Holidays sign with our favorite Peanuts characters, which we proudly display on a window in our kitchen. In the Peanuts theme, I also recommend the Peanuts tablecloth, dinner and luncheon plates, and napkins. The items are perfect for a holiday party for children and adults of all ages. For us at home, the paperware makes a regular pizza night more festive for the season (and I love that I don’t have to wash dishes). Be sure to order the paper products early in the season as they sell out quickly!
Guaranteed Snowball fight! (No snow necessary)
One of the most fun gifts I ordered for our kids is the dozen plush funny face snowballs. I plan to open this gift first on Christmas so we can enjoy a fun indoor snowball fight while we are comfortable and warm inside opening other presents. I ordered the plush dozen, but saw later that they have several other options including a complete pack with stress ball snowballs and more. On my list for next year for sure!
I love Oriental Trading Company’s products for birthday parties especially. My oldest turns twelve next month and I’d love to throw her a movie night themed party. If I do, I’ll share the details with you on what I ordered to throw a perfect movie night party.
This is a sponsored post in partnership with Oriental Trading Company. The author was free to select her own items to facilitate the writing of this post, and the opinions expressed here are her own.
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