Teamwork makes the artwork: how holiday crafts build family ties.
The art process allows the family to strengthen their bond through the creative art process and to appreciate each other’s different perspectives. It also empowers the family’s creative thinking and stimulates the family’s identity as a team. This in turn improves the mental health care and well-being for the family through creativity and art.
The creative expression through the therapeutic art process allows the family to gain new insight about themselves and each other. It fosters creative thinking and is a healthy, creative outlet for the family, allowing them to connect. It empowers children with confidence and reinforces the building of optimism, resiliency and strength in the family. Art brings the family together to talk, laugh, learn, share ideas and create!
Not only is holiday art a fun, celebratory feature activity, but it offers a physical keepsake of all the happy memories. Creating art together as a family aids in teaching problem-solving, self-love and appreciation. Parents can utilize art as a confidence-building tool for their kids because there is no right or wrong way to create art. It helps calm and is a fun, healthy activity to do as a family.
Art aids in emotional expression and allows us to stop, breathe and experience soothing calmness. Art as a family brings joyfulness, can bring out imagination, laughter and a shared love of creating. The creative art making brings feelings of pride, success and allows for healthy self-expression/awareness.
Some beneficial, fun fall and Halloween art workshops and art activities we often do with families, which all have therapeutic benefits, include crafting, decorative nature art, wood art, drawing, painting and expressive mask-making.
You can try a family collaborative painting where the Halloween theme or subject of the painting is personalized and each individual’s piece comes together to create one image. For example, it could be a special word and symbolization, an abstract design, or images that come together to make a cohesive picture.
Family collages with a holiday theme are always a great expressive, mindful, relaxing and crafty activity, and is also really great fun for the younger kids. It is also a great, playful introduction to art. Collaging could include various soothing and stimulating sensory elements, such as fabric, stickers, paint, feathers and pom-poms. It could include painting, as well. This is a great activity we do where the family comes together and adds their own special touches to the artwork, which they can cherish forever, along with the colorful memories.
We love to create self-expression holiday masks each Halloween, which is so much fun and allows each person to personalize their creative plastic or wooden masks with paint and jewels or to make a spooky and unique character costume mask to wear while trick-or-treating, or for just a fun, family night at home.
One more of our favorite Halloween activities, which can also be tailored to any holiday or occasion with various applicable decorative elements, is our self-care, succulent, spooky wreaths/painted pumpkins. These easy-to-do nature art activities are great fun for all ages and can be made together as a family to decorate the home for the holidays or as a holiday gift for a loved one!
The possibilities of art activities to do as a family are endless and so healing.
Find Diana “MissDee” Shabtai, Psy.D., ATR-BC, at Art Therapy OC in Newport Beach, online at arttherapyoc.com or @ArtTherapyOC on Instagram and Facebook.
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