Christmas With Your Residents

Love Christmas In Your Care Home!

Activities from the 1st of December, all the way up to Christmas Day ensures that your residents will love their Christmas in your care home

Christmas Activities:

1. Make a holiday wreath, get creative by using materials such as candy canes, paper rolls, wine corks, and clothespins. Use your imagination.
2. Decorate and fill stockings with little presents. Try using felt, paint and a lot of glitter!
3. Make festive baubles and decorate your Christmas tree. You could use wool, sequins or glitter to cover a plastic or paper bauble.
4. Involve your residents as you decorate the home and their rooms. Give people choices of what decorations are used and where they are put. This would be a great occasion to invite family members to come and join in!
5. Play some board and card games, or maybe a festive game of charades with your residents. The more the merrier!
6. Ask the people you support for their favourite Christmas tunes and play them all together like a show.
7. Have a Christmas sing a-long, you could even hire a pianist or a choir to perform at your care home!
8. Have a ‘family film night’ and watch one of your resident’s favourite Christmas film, with popcorn, extra pillows, and lots of blankets to keep warm.
9. Enjoy tea or coffee together with your residents as a group. You could even talk about what they would like to do for the rest of the countdown to Christmas and the end of the year.
10. Bake some holiday cookies with your residents, like gingerbread and shortbread.
11. Cook or prepare mince pies together with your residents.
12. Have a gift wrap party – don’t worry if things aren’t perfectly wrapped, it’s the fun that counts!
13. Give the people you support help with holiday cards – writing, addressing, or sealing envelopes.
14. Make and put on a nativity scene with your residents or other carers.
15. Help your residents make paper snowflakes by cutting up paper or sticking card together.
16. Go on an outing with your residents around the neighbourhood or through a local park. Make sure to wrap up warm.
17. Put together clips and pictures from residents’ previous holidays to make a slideshow of memories. (try using InteractiveMe)
18. Make an indoor snowman by stuffing white pillowcases with scrunched up newspaper, a scarf and hat to accessorise and black/orange card to make facial features. You could read the Raymond Briggs story of the Snowman together with your residents.
19. Take your residents to go watch the local panto or ask a local drama company to come and perform in your care home.
20. Help your residents to choose and purchase gifts online to give to families, friends or other residents.
21. Ask people (or their families) if they have any Christmas traditions that they as a family or an individual would enjoy doing in the festive season. Can you help them to carry out that tradition this year?
22. Find out when your local church is holding a carol service and take some of your residents along. If this isn’t possible, ask the church if they would be able to bring a service to you.
23. Host a Christmas craft day where you invite family members in to enjoy making some Christmassy goodies with their loved one.
24. Spend some time asking your residents what their goals/hopes are for 2020, have them on display somewhere and then work with friends, family and colleagues to try and make those things happen.
25. Relax and enjoy Christmas!