Easy Homemade Santa’s Cookie Plate

Nothing is quite as fun as building up excitement for Christmas morning with your children! I always love seeing my little boys faces light up as we gear up for the holidays by putting up a Christmas tree, counting down the days, and carrying out our annual traditions like making homemade sugar cookies!

I’ve been wanting to make a Santa’s Cookie Plate for a few years now, but finally got the gumption to sit down and create a cookie plate with my kids this year. It took us no more than 20 minutes and I absolutely love the result! We went thrifty, so the whole project was really inexpensive, too, and we’ll use our homemade Santa’s Cookie Plate year after year!

 

You’ll need:

• White plate (or red or green plate if you prefer)
• Paint Markers

Start by picking up a plate at a thrift store or rummaging through your older dishes to find a perfect plate. A thrift store is the perfect place to look as you just need one mismatched plate, not a full set of dishes. I like using a white plate, but you could also use red, green or even a blue plate could look nice. Using a colorful plate as your base, you’ll want to use white and black Paint Markers to have your designs show up.

The plate I picked out had lines around the edge which gave me an easy guide for creating a pattern without much effort. You could also look for a plate with a smooth raised edge so you can add snowflakes, swirls, polka dots, or whatever you come up with. It all depends on the look you want!

Next, plan out a design for your plate. I knew I wanted my plate to read like a letter to Santa with my kids signing their names on the plate, so it was personalized for my family. Because of this, I wanted to have more design around the outer edge and leave the center empty for text.

Now, it was time to get my Paint Markers ready. You just shake the paint pen up and down to get the paint inside ready. Then, you press down on the tip of the pen until the paint starts to flow for the first use. Once it’s flowing, you’re ready to paint! I drew designs around each of the rings on the outer edge of my plate using my red and green markers.

When I finished my outer edge design, I started writing my letter to Santa. Then, it was time to personalize our plate, including letting my 4 year old sign his own name on our plate. It will be so precious to look back on this plate year after year as my boys grow up and see his cute handwriting from this year as we look back.

Paint Markers are incredibly easy to use! I used the Elmer’s Painters Bright Colors Paint Markers pack, which includes red, green, blue, white, and black – a perfect set for designing a Santa’s Cookies Plate! Using them is just like writing with a medium soft tipped marker, but it goes on smooth and easily and dries quickly without smudging like a pen might do. I also appreciated that I could wet a cloth and wipe off mistakes if I wiped them up quickly if I started to change my mind or when I went out of the lines of my plate.

When you are done with your design, allow it to dry completely and then set out your plate on display until Christmas! When Christmas Eve rolls around, be sure to dish out some cookies for Santa to remind him that your family has been good this year and would love to see presents under the tree on Christmas morning!