Winter Solstice Activities and Crafts for Kids

The winter solstice happens on Dec. 21 (as I write this in 2025, anyway) in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s sort of the real beginning of the holiday season. It marks the beginning of the coldest season, but it’s also the shortest day, with the least amount of sunlight all year. So the solstice is a time of celebration of the returning of the light.

If your family celebrates the solstice or Yule, you may already have some favorite traditions and decorations you use, but whether you’re new to celebrating or not, I hope you’ll find some fun ideas here.

Go for a nature walk (yes, even if it’s cold!) and gather materials to make your own solstice wreath. These are great to hang on the door or have on the table for Christmas or other holiday celebrations. Learn how to do it with this tutorial from Kid Minds. While you’re outside you can do the winter scavenger hunt that is one of the ideas for celebrating solstice with kids from Backwoods Mama. I also love the wet-felted lantern on that page.

Speaking of lanterns, since winter solstice is about the returning of the light and it’s the longest night, making your own lanterns or luminaries is a great activity. I love these simple but pretty paper luminaries from Art Bar; you could try doing this with paper towel tubes, too.

Or make an ice lantern with this tutorial from Little Cooks Reading Books. The post has lots of ideas for things to add to your water before you freeze it, but plain ice is pretty, too (and then you can paint the ice with watercolors!).

There’s also these pretty snowy tree lanterns from Wineberry Wood Press, which are fun for kids and adults to make together. They also have a fun solstice countdown calendar you can make to count the days until your solstice celebration.

The winter solstice is a great time to acknowledge nature and put some food out for the local animals. Run Wild My Child does the classic pinecone seed feeder and dried orange slices, which you can also use as decor inside since they look like the sun.

Do you have any traditions or crafts you like to do for the winter solstice? I’d love to hear about it!

Celebrating the Winter Solstice with Kids [Lesson Plans]

Happy Winter Solstice! [Polymer Clay]

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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