The other day in the Programming Librarian Interest Group on FB page someone (Melissa Hozik) mentioned that they were having a Doctor Who themed holiday program. And someone (Evan Mather) then mentioned that they should call it a Doctor Wholiday Party. Genius!! As a huge Doctor Who fan I was disappointed in myself for not coming up with this FANTASTIC and BRILLIANT idea, but I quickly got over it. The Teen and I are now planning our own Doctor Wholiday party. The best part is that because I know a lot of libraries are trying to do winter programming as opposed to Christmas programming to be inclusive, we are doing ours in January because you can have a Doctor Wholiday party any time. There is no wrong time to celebrate Doctor Who! And we spent the weekend test piloting ideas for our program.

The Doctor Who Tree

Ornament #1

We took pictures of some of our favorite Doctor Who artifacts and blended them with galaxy effects to create our ornaments. We then printed them off and laminated them. Hot glue them to a clothespin and you have a quick, easy and definitely not permanent Doctor Who tree.

Then, because I had a brainstorm, I did the same thing with book covers. Print the covers, laminate them and hot glue them to a clothespin. Bam! You can make a book tree (pictured above). They also hang well on twine to make garland.

Ornament #2

You can take plastic craft ornaments and do the whole paint thing. I had to look all over for plastic ones because I wasn’t brave enough to do glass with the teens. You basically pour a small bit of paint into the ornaments – 2 to 3 colors – and swish the paint around. Dry over night on a paper plate with the open side down so that the excess runs out. Be sure and write the teens name on the plate so you know whose ornament is whose. We did ours using Doctor Who tardis and galaxy colors to make our ornaments Doctor Who themed. You can find better instructions here.

Ornament #3

If you are really lucky you can find clear plastic ornaments that are in halves that you can fill and decorate. We used these to make Dalek themed ornaments. We used a black paint marker to make a bunch of dots on the inside and then painted a solid color behind them. I’m not going to lie, I love the Dalekish ornaments.

Ornament #4

A coworker had shown me this new melty bead craft that involved using metal cookie cutters and melty beads. You simply put the cookie cutter on a piece of parchment paper, fill it with melty beads, and cook it in an oven set at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes. We used snowmen and star ornaments to go along with our Doctor Who theme, and because The Snowmen is one of my favorite Christmas episodes of Doctor Who. You can push them out of the cookie cutter to re-use said cookie cutter, but it looked better when we left it in the cookie cutter as kind of a metal frame. So buy a lot of cookie cutters cheap. I followed the instructions that I found here.

Ornament #5

You remember when we used to fold a piece of paper up into a tiny triangle and then cut away at it to make paper snowflakes? There are lots of examples of this with a Doctor Who theme on the Internet. For example, here and here. The best part about this is that after having to buy cookie cutters, melty beads, ornaments, clothespins and paint, it’s super cheap!

Ornament #6

This one is all The Teen’s doing. She made a bow tie – because bow ties are cool! – out of duct tape. She hot glued it to a clip so that she can wear it in her hair, but you can also easily clip it to a tree branch. Double duty! To make a duct tape bow tie you simply make a two sided sheet of duct tape and accordion fold it. Pinch it together in the center and affix it with a piece of duct tape.

So my “Doctor Wholiday Party” – thank you Evan – test run is at my house this Sunday. I invited some fellow Whovians and the TLT TAB that is local to me over to see how it works. I will also be pulling some ideas from a previous post on Doctor Who, including some of the food we will be making. It’s a great sacrifice having this test run, but it’s one I’m willing to make . . . for the teens of course.