I’ve always loved the idea of a felt Christmas tree for the kids, but was never ambitious enough to make my own. Thanks to an early Christmas gift, we now have a version the kids can use. Although we didn’t craft ours, the idea is so wonderful that it merits a blog post.

If you are going to tackle a homemade version, you’ll need to start with a very large piece of green felt. Cut out a Christmas tree shape and then cut a stump from brown felt; use tacky glue or hot glue to attach them together.

Add Velcro dots at various intervals on the tree and hang on a wall.

For ornaments, you can then use additional colors of felt to cut out simple Christmas shapes: think yellow stars, red candy canes, or little squares for gift boxes. Use hot glue any time you want to attach two colors of felt together where details are needed, like ribbon on the gift boxes.

Needless to say, I wasn’t that crafty and was so thankful to receive this early gift for the kids. What’s wonderful about these felt trees is that kids can decorate them again and again without getting near the real (breakable!) ornaments.

Veronika in particular loved the tree. We talked about each item as she attached them to the Velcro squares, or the colors or shapes. She loved pointing out that the presents were squares, or the hooks of the candy canes.

She even pulled off one particular ornament in the shape of a lollipop and enjoyed “feeding” it to her stuffed animals. What a thoughtful Christmas gift!

I also appreciated how easy it was for her to attach or pull off the decorations, thanks to the Velcro dots.

Big brother Travis swooped in now and then to add an ornament.

And whenever the kids want to, they can take everything off and start all over again!

This is definitely a decoration that we’ll trot out to play with for years to come.