Candy Christmas Wreath

One of my favorite holiday traditions is making a candy Christmas wreath for my mother-in-law. I thought I would share the directions with you. Here's what you need to purchase for this craft: 2 bags of hard candies (red and green peppermints are traditional but I use Werther's butterscotches because they are my mother-in-law's favorite and they look so festive in their shiny gold wrappers.)curling ribbon for attaching the candy to the wreath. (This year I used 3 colors: red, green, and silver.) and fancy ribbon for decorating the wire coat hanger (I purchased ribbon with a metallic gold sheen to it at Michael's craft store.) Here's what else you need that you may already have around your house: wire coat hanger, scissors, hot glue gun.

Start by bending the wire coat hanger into a wreath shape. My husband did this for me. Thanks, honey! Be sure to retain the hook at the top. This will be used to hang your wreath! Use hot glue to attach the fancy ribbon to the wire coat hanger. If this is your first time using hot glue, be careful. It really is hot and it's easy to burn your fingers with it.

In years gone by, I didn't take the time for this step and when the candies were eaten off the wreath, the wire coat hanger underneath looked pretty lousy. Adding the ribbon just dresses up this simple craft a bit more.

For the next step, you will need to cut off 12" lengths of the curling ribbon (by the way, you can find curling ribbon in the gift wrap aisle). Take the cut curling ribbon and tie it around one end of the candy so the two ends of the curling ribbon are approximately the same length. (This is art not science, so don't worry if it's not exact.)
At this point I like to enlist help from my family so we can say that we all contributed to Grandma's present. It's helpful to sort the tied candy by the color of the ribbon. You want to end up with the same number of ribbons in each color.

Now you are ready to tie the candy on to the wreath. I tie it twice to make it hold securely. Then I curl the ends of the ribbon by rubbing the blade of the scissors against it quickly. I alternate the colors like this: red, silver, green, red, silver, green, ... I position the candies so some are above the hanger loop and others are below it. You can also gently slide the candies so they are as closely bunched or spread out as you like.


The final step is to attach a pair of scissors to the wreath. I used an extra length of my fancy ribbon for this. I wrapped the length around the wreath a few times so it could hang down longer as the candy gets eaten but for now would hang near the middle of the wreath. Here's what our family's completed project looked like this year. My mother-in-law was very happy to receive it at Thanksgiving!