How to make Magic Christmas Eve Reindeer Dust

This is a great tradition to start with your own family or to give as a home made gift to another family. You can adjust the recipe to make a large or small batch. And it is a great art project in school.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Oatmeal
• Glitter
• Baggies or jars
• Paper or Cardboard
• Tape or Ribbon
• Colored Sugar (instead of glitter)
• Sprinkles (instead of glitter or colored sugar)

1. 
   Oatmeal

   Prepare a mixture of Quaker oatmeal and glitter. Make the recipe to your liking. Like a 1/2 cup of oatmeal and a 1/3 cup of glitter.

2. 
   Food Coloring

   If you are worried about the birds eating the oatmeal with glitter on it, then replace the glitter with colored sugar. The recipe to make it yourself is 1 cup white sugar and add 2 drops any color liquid food color. Put the sugar into a jar. Drip the food coloring onto the sugar, close the lid, and shake vigorously for about 1 minute. Adjust color with additional food coloring and repeat if the color is too light.

3. 

   You can also use sprinkles or tiny candies go natural with cranberries, instead of glitter or colored sugar.

4. 

   In a Ziploc baggie or a baggie that you can tie with a ribbon or a small glass jar, a baby food jar works great, too.

5. On a small slip of heavy paper write or using your computer type and print out the following message.
   
   "To Boys and Girls, both young and old.
   the legend has been told.
   On Christmas Eve, sprinkle all over your lawn.
   This glitter to lead Santa to your house before dawn.
   The smell of the oats will guide the reindeer directly to you.
   The Christmas Hope in the magic dust helps make your wishes come true.
   But,remember as soon as your done
   Off to bed, you go, hurry, run."

6. 
   Magic Dust in a bottle

   Either tape the message to the baggy or attach with a ribbon. You could actually put the paper inside the baggy if there's not too much oatmeal in the way to read it! You can make several at a time just line up your baggies and go down the row with your ingredients.

Tips & Warnings

• You can scale the recipe up or down. You can scale it up to put it in a decorated baby food jar or scale it down to put inside a Christmas card.
• You can use sprinkles that go on top of cupcakes instead of glitter or sugar but it will not glitter on the lawn. Just replace glitter with the word food on the message.
• Glitter is not good for birds.

[showpup]

on 12/5/2007 What a cute idea!

[pianistic]

on 12/2/2007 I agree. I think this would be a great craft project for school kids.

[bmi57]

on 12/1/2007 I will have to send this one to my daughter and granddaughter for them to share with the school. Thanks.