Every year we love taking our kids on a Twinkle Tour to look at all the Christmas light displays throughout the city.
Often we glitter some printed off “Polar Express” tickets, and surprise the kids at bedtime when they are already in their jammies to head off on the tour. We always grab hot cocoa and donuts or cookies, as well as an ornament to gift to the house we deem our favourite display.
In recent years, we’ve also added a Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt that keeps us looking for particular items. It’s a blast whether we are all playing together or if we split up into separate vehicles and have a competition. The girls’ loss to the boys last year on the account of not finding a “carollers” decoration is still fresh.
This year we just completed our twinkle tour and with a smaller group, wanted to find something fun that we could all do in the same vehicle, but still have a little friendly competition with. We found the perfect activity and it was Twinkle Tour Bingo.
The premise is very similar but allowed us each to compete individually rather than all spotting the same things as a group. Every person gets a bingo sheet with the standard 25 squares. On each square is a different decoration that you might see on people’s yards. It could be baby Jesus, red lights, laser lights, a snowman, a wreath or Santa.
Thankfully the pre-made Bingo sheets from thisreadingmam.com were all pictures of items, which was perfect for our beginning reader.
Very quickly we learned that we needed to make a rule that you could only use one item from each yard, as some houses had so many decorations that you could easily Bingo out on their yard alone.
Even if you didn’t find pre-made sheets it would be super simple to draw out/label your own. Just make sure to vary the cards so that they’re all different. We played any line Bingo and then Blackout as well and awarded prizes to the winners.
