Make Easy & Fun Christmas Candles With Wax and Sand

You can make candles. Really, you can. It’ll probably take a trip to a local craft store for some supplies but it’s well worth it to have your handmade candles adding their warm flickering glow to your other Christmas decorations.

One way to do it is to use a sandbox. Not the kind at school but a box filled with damp sand. Make an indentation in the sand for a mold. You can use a drinking glass or a juice can or something similar and push it into the sand as deep as you want your candle to be tall (say, 3 or 4 inches). Suspend a wick (from the craft store) from something as simple as a plastic straw over the top of the indentation. Pour melted colored wax – even add a scent to it – into the indentation, following the directions on the package you bought at the craft store. When everything is cool and solid you can remove the candle and trim the wick to about half an inch above the surface of the candle. Your sand mold is then ready for the next pour and the candles themselves have an interesting sandy texture on the outside.

If you make a bunch of these you can float them in a decorative bowl full of water. And, if you round off the bottom of the sand mold they float better than if their bottoms are the same diameter as their tops.

Written by Dianne Weller