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Growing Candy Canes

This is a fun, magical Christmas activity to do with your kids this holiday season. It is simple, relatively inexpensive. It doesn’t take any time at all to set up, but the magic and excitement last forever. Your kids will forever remember planting and growing candy canes.

Growing Candy Canes

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It’s really simple, really fun, especially when your kids are younger and still truly believe in the magic of Christmas.

What You Need:

  • tic-tacs – we have used white as pictures but we have also used red and white which were perfect for growing red and white candy canes
  • sugar
  • candy canes
  • a container to “plant” in
Growing Candy Canes

How to Grow Candy Canes

Fill up your container with sugar. Blake took the lead on this one while I sat back with the camera and enjoyed watching them plant their seeds.

They taste tested the seeds to see if they were good to be eaten like that, like pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, they were surprised that they tasted like mint.

Growing Candy Canes

Then take your seeds and start planting them.

Growing Candy Canes

They each took turns planting some seeds.

After they were planted we had to figure out where to put them for them to grow. They decided on the fridge. Where it is dark and cold, which is how they figured the North Pole is, where Santa, of course, is, and where Candy Canes must be.

Growing Candy Canes

This is a great chance to let your kids take the lead and their imagination grow.

Austin figured that because we were growing candy canes, the seeds must be magic, and she had no doubt that they would grow quickly.

Later that night, those seeds grew magically into seeds. We must have had really fast-growing seeds but yours don’t have to.

Growing Candy Canes

More Ideas

You can easily draw the growing of your seeds out. One way to do this is to use mints, that way the round tops look similar to the roundness of the candy canes.

You could bury candy canes in your container depending on the size of your candy canes and the size of the jar, and pull them up a little more each night to give the illusion of them growing.

Growing Candy Canes

How to: Growing Candy Canes

Yield: 1+
Prep Time: 1 minute
Active Time: 2 minutes
Additional Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 23 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Estimated Cost: $5

Grow your own candy canes this holiday season and bring the magic of the season into your home.

Materials

  • candy canes
  • tic tacs
  • sugar
  • mints - optional

Tools

  • jar or other container to plant in

Instructions

    1. Fill up your container with sugar.
    2. Have children plant tic tac seeds.
    3. Set aside for them to grow.
    4. Later on put mints or candy canes into your sugar.

Notes

You can easily draw the growing of your seeds out. One way to do this is to use mints, that way the round tops looks similar to the roundness of the candy canes.

You could bury candy canes in your container depending on the size of your candy canes and the size of the jar, and pull them up a little more each night to give the illusion of them growing.

Maybe this is something the Elf on the Shelf sets up for your kids. Or maybe bring back the ingredients to do from the North Pole. As you can see we had decorated our tic tac container to make it look like a container of seeds.

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