One of our favourite Christmas Eve traditions is sprinkling our homemade pet friendly reindeer dust on the path outside our house just before bedtime.
When I look through our Christmas photos over the years, it’s so cute to see the kids changing each year as they spread the reindeer dust they’ve made themselves on the path to make sure that Santa doesn’t have trouble finding us. From little toddlers to non believers – it’ll always be one of our family traditions I hope!
It does upset me though that some people still use actual glitter in their Reindeer dust! I admit that glitter looks better because it has much more sparkle that my version but really, is it worth it? The glitter can cause damage to wildlife and pets who may eat it so I’d much rather make my less sparkly but kind to animals Pet Friendly Reindeer Dust and enjoy our family tradition safe in the knowledge that no creature will be harmed by it!
Pet Friendly Reindeer Dust
I used coloured sugar in our Reindeer dust instead of glitter and I find it’s a good idea to colour your sugar a day or so before you’ll be making it to give it chance to dry our although it’s not a drama if you don’t have chance to.
To make your coloured sugar, pop the amount of sugar you want (1/2 a coffee cup full will do one portion) in a ziplock plastic bag along with a few drops of your chosen food colouring and scrunch it around to get as much of the food colouring mixed in with the sugar as possible. Continue to add a couple of drops of food colouring until all your sugar is coated.
Or you could just do it like Master Frugal does and whack it all in a bowl and mix until your arm hurts!
You can leave this on your kitchen windowsill to dry out for a day or two or you can just add a spoonful of flour which helps absorb some of the moisture so you can use it straight away.
If you can’t be bothered with the edible sugar then you can just use edible glitter that you’ll find in the baking section at any supermarket.
Next you just need to add some oats (a big bag of value oats is around 50p in our local shop) to the edible glitter / sprinkles. I usually add around half a cup of oats to the coloured glitter.
We usually pop it into Cellophone bags (we used a sandwich bag last year tbh) and tie a label around the top with some Christmassy ribbon but this year I had some lovely little glass jars that I bought from the charity shop that were perfect for it. We used a label that Jen gave us to stick on the front and voila – homemade pet friendly reindeer dust.
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Image Credit:Shutterstock, iLight photo
