While I love wintery decorations overall and have memories of mesmerizing, twinkling Christmas lights and vintage ornaments hanging on grandparents’ trees, when my husband and I got married and had our own house, we weren’t really into having a tree. I still loved the idea of hanging up some kind of decoration with the changing seasons, like little crochet garlands, maybe, or fairy lights, but a tree honestly wasn’t that important to us. We both focus more this season on homey things and just enjoying time with each other and – in a normal year – visiting family or having parties with friends. It was never so much about ornaments or presents.

But when our son was around 2, I think, my mother-in-law gave us this tiny, two-foot tree of hers, just so he’d have somewhere to hang the gifted ornaments he was amassing a collection of from family and projects at preschool. And so now, three years on, we still have this tiny tree, nearly covered in baubles and paper crafts with it’s primary colored lights blinking through.

While I’m still not sure about the tree, this year being what it is, I actually made a few attempts to get a slightly bigger one, just to hold the collection of ornaments. But after seeing the prices of even little artificial trees and giving up on finding one we trusted the quality of that was also on sale for what we could afford, I gave up and pulled out the tiny tree to decorate. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem as overwhelmed by ornaments as I remembered this year, but next year my be the time to finally retire it.

As I mentioned, this year being what it is, and doing virtual school at home with my son, I’ve felt a pull to do more crafts each season that we can use as decor. At the start of fall, we stamped with apples halves and leaves, and I hung the papers we finished up on our pantry door, where they still hand now, actually. For his Halloween costume, we collaborated on a firetruck made from a cardboard box. And for this wintery season, I thought maybe a little snowy village of blocky houses would be a nice, sort of magical project for him.

I set off searching on Pinterest for diys and looked over the options – the little wooden block houses were cute and most like the style I was going for, but we don’t have easy access to wood cutting tools right now, and sanding would be a lot of work for what I wanted to be a quicker start to the project. There were several printable templates, but most were more intricate than what I was going for. I finally found these printables from Magnolia, and they were simple enough to work for what I wanted, though I did change up a few things, which I’ll share below.

The original tutorial on Magnolia uses thicker cardboard, whereas I had saved some thin cardboard Little Debbie and graham cracker boxes to use. This affected the way the roofs fit, and I should have kept this in mind when I cut the roofs out and added a 1/4 inch or so around each one. You can see in the pictures that the edges of the roofs meet just so with the top edges of the sides of the house and I was unable to glue them all around. Instead, I used some extra cardboard to create a couple braces for each house, which I hotglued in place like support beams, then hotglued the roofs to those supports. Even with the bit of wonkiness, I’m happy with the overall look and end result.

I also constructed them a bit differently than the tutorial guides. I used scrapbooking paper instead of fabric, and instead of covering each piece individually I laid the pieces for each house out in a row along the scrapbooking paper, gluing them in place with Mod Podge. I could fit all four wall pieces for the smaller houses in one row, and the medium houses in two rows, with two walls each. Doing them this way allowed me to have less seems to glue together when I folded the wall pieces in place for the final houses. Since the medium house have two seams, one is visible on the front of the house – you can see the seem for the grey house above if you look closely – but for a project with my five-year-old, I knew it wouldn’t matter.

After I constructed the houses, he drew the windows and doors on construction paper of his choice, I cut them out, then he glued them in place with an Elmer’s gluestick. I love doing this kind of collaborative craft with him, and I think the houses look really funky and fun so far.

We have plans to add chimneys to a few of the houses, and I’m also brainstorming ways to add strings of lights to some of them – maybe embroidery thread and tiny beads? We also might add some sort of snow.

Oh, and the trees are cut from an old paper towel roll and I glued them into shape with hotglue. Then my son painted them green. We will probably decorate those today, too, using some sequins from a craft kit he has, most likely.

Something like this, that creates a project for a season when we can’t go out and do all the normal things we might, especially with a child at an age where they’re really into all the holiday things, fills at least a few moments with something to look forward to, to work with our hands and our brains, to see something beautiful that reminds us of the normal coziness of the season we’re in come from that work.

This is the second post in a cold weather series called “keeping warm.” Find the first post all about it here.