Every year on the feast of St. Nicholas, we give our children Gold Coins, Holy Cards, and a yearly “note from St. Nicholas” telling the children what they need to work on between now and Christmas.
For the past few years I have wanted to order the beautiful St. Nicholas embossed foil chocolates I have seen online, but just haven’t been able to spend the money (It all goes towards books, if you hadn’t noticed! lol!) and have settled for repackaging the dollar bags of chocolates from the local grocery store. (You can see an example in last years post for the Feast of St. Nicholas.)
This year I decided to come up with my own affordable alternative. I am so excited!!!
I cropped some of our favorite images of St. Nicholas to fit on the face of the large 1 1/2″ Chocolate Coins (The bags of coins are available for $1.00 per bag at many grocery stores, including the Dollar Store, or you can purchase a 12 pack for $12.18 at Amazon right now. Update: I now buy them from Trader Joe’s in lovely gold bags. Many options are available online), created a word document with all the images adding an optional border to the images, cut them all out, and then glued them to the front of the coins.
Didn’t they turn out pretty?!?
I thought I would share my document with you all as an early Christmas Present in case any of you would like to do the same for your children.
St. Nicholas Chocolate Coins
St. Nicholas Chocolate Coins Printable
Making these really got my mind spinning with all the variations I could make so I called my husband and asked him to bring home a few more bags of coins!
So, as a bonus, here are a few other documents I created. Yes, I stayed up WAY too late! 😉
Christmas Chocolate Coins
O Antiphon Chocolate Coins
Jesse Tree Chocolate Coins
I made our Jesse Tree Coins using the smaller 1″ coins. These would be a great alternative for ornaments (to go along with the readings and coloring pages) for a Jesse Tree if you attached a small piece of ribbon to hang them with and then they could be enjoyed on Christmas! I think I will add the set I made to this year’s Jesse Tea.
NOTE: For 1″ Coins, just use the above documents printed at 70%!
I had so much fun making these and my husband loved how they turned out. He suggested that Chocolate Coins with an image of the children’s patron saints would even make great gifts from the tooth fairy!
I hope some of you are able to use this idea! As always you are more than welcome to link to this post, but I do ask that, if you do, you link directly here and not to the documents at Scribd. That way, if the documents ever need to be moved, your links won’t be broken. (2016 Update: The documents did indeed need to be moved and are now available over at Dropbox. Please continue linking directly to this post.) Also, I always ask that my pictures are not reposted elsewhere without prior permission, but in this case, I will allow the one picture at the very top of the post to be shared if you wish. Thank you for your consideration in this, I so appreciate all of my visitors here at Shower of Roses!
I hope your Advent is off to a very blessed start!
Oh my goodness! I love them! Thank you so much Jessica for sharing these with us. I am definitly going to use the St. Nicholas coins and I might use the christmas coins for christmas gifts.
God Bless you and I hope you and your family are having a great Advent so far.
Grace
Super cute!!!
so cute and I like them more than the chocolates you linked to at the top 🙂
What a wonderful idea!! Thanks so much for sharing God bless!
Christine
Fabulous idea Jessica! I'm so excited to try this out! Thank you so much for sharing.
lovely. i wanted to use gold chocolate coins this year but can't find a product made in the US. 🙁
i'll try to brainstrom how i can use your wonderful creation if i can't find what i'm looking for.
pax christi – lena
Way too wonderful!!!! I can't thank you enough for going to all this trouble and sharing so generously with us. You are a real inspiration! I can pull this off just in time for the feast 🙂
What a great idea!! Thank you so much for sharing your documents. The images you chose are beautiful!!
This is such a clever and cute idea!
I loved your idea!!! I will have to try that too! Would you be interested in having a Spanish version for the O Antiphon coins? I can send you the translation and you post the file. Let me know so I can plan on a post on that as well! If you want, you can email me at xolivas(at)familiacatolica.org
Thank you for sharing always wonderful ideas!! Have a blessed Advent!
Thank you everyone! I'm glad you like them!
Xhonane ~ That is a neat idea. This evening, after my kids are in bed, I was going to try and make a Latin version to match our O Antiphon House blocks. I could probably work on a Spanish version too if you send me the translations.
Hi Jessica,
I love the coin ideas…i was just going to do the plain old coins, but this would be really special! I am having trouble linking to the documents to print, without going to the Sribd site. I haved tried to link to both of your blogs. Could you please let me know what i might be doing wrong? Thank you!
Susan
Susan ~ I am sorry that you are having a hard time downloading the documents. The links in this post take you to the actual document which is (currently) located on the Scribd website. Once you click the link you should be able to choose whether you'd like to download it to your computer or print it directly from Scribd. I hope that helps! If not, spend my your email address and I will email the document directly to you. God bless!
wow this is the best thing you have done yet, at least in my chocaholic opinion 😉
I am so excited about these! You are the BEST, Jessica! Thanks for sharing these! Happy Advent to you and yours.
I've ordered the Paidea coins the last two years, but I love this idea and will file it away for next year! Thanks! (BTW, the Paidea coins are much yummier than dollar store coins … but they're not supposed to be for Mommy, huh?)
Thanks, Jessica. You're sweet!
truly, you are so cool.
Thank you for sharing! Visiting your blog give me so much inspiration (or awesome ideas to copy:). I had picked up a bag of coins from BJ's so I'm off to print these beautiful labels. God bless.
You are very inspiring! God Bless you and all of your efforts! Thank you for sharing this wonderful idea with all of us! Joene
Love, love, love!!
Love it, just an amazingly great idea! Thanks for sharing this with us!
A wonderful idea that I will tuck away for next year. I did "splurge" a bit and get some pretty St. Nicholas coins at Emmanuel Books this year … With the baby due in two weeks, I have to keep things simple. But hopefully next year, I can take on this craft.
(And thank you for sharing your hard work—those documents—with all of us. How generous of you!)
I recently found your blog and I am so thankful for all of your ideas and your generousity in sharing them! I have found so much inspiration here, and our four children are benefitting greatly. I LOVE these coins- and will definitely be using them on Saturday! God bless your beautiful family.
These are so do-able, but absolutely charming and a teaching tool at the same time. Thank you for sharing this idea. New to your blog – but will most certainly be back!
This is so awesome! Thank you for sharing this and many other creative ideas for celebrating the liturgical year. We are really enjoying your Jesse tree posting with coloring pages too!
I was just looking at the coins online the other day and realized we could not afford them for all our children either. What an excellent idea and thank you so much for sharing all your hard work. God bless!
Christine
Jessica, as always, you are amazing beyond words!!! Your creativeness & generosity are such a blessing to so many Catholic families. God Bless you.
Wow! Thanks for sharing! I'm definitely going to morph our coins too!
Hi Jessica! I am so sorry I didn't see your reply before! If you still have a chance, here is the translation:
Wisdom – Sabiduría
Adonai – Adonai
Stock if Jesse – Raíz de Jesé
Key of Davis – Llave de David
Dawn – Luz de la Mañana
King – Rey de las Naciones
Emmanuel – Emanuel or Emmanuel
Thank you! God bless!!
Jessica, you're a genius, thank you so much!!!
These are lovely! I'm going to add them to our coins tonight in preparation for St. Nicholas Day!
OMGoodness, Jessica! You are so awesome! Thank you, thank you, thank you. May God bless your creativity and your generosity!
I have five little mesh bags squirreled away somewhere–chocolate coins purchased at…hmmm…The Party Store, I think?…and if I find them (always an iffy variable when it comes to seasonal retrieval) I will be decorating them with these lovely print-outs.
Merci beaucoup! And happy feast. 🙂
THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH for sharing these. I am going to have to make this a yearly tradition. What a great idea. Thanks for sharing them…I would never have been able to figure out all the correct sizing. You are awesome! God bless.
Thank you so much. It would have taken me forever to even attempt all of the work of compiling even one of the sets of pictures! You are really talented(in many ways) and abundantly generous in sharing your gifts with all of us. A blessed Advent to you!
Jessica, I've been following your blog for about a year now. My son was born on St. Nicholas' Feast Day and we're having his 2nd birthday/St. Nicholas party tomorrow! These are perfect!!!!! All the kids are getting them in their treat boxes when they leave! Thank you so much for sharing!
Oh, and also I'm using double sided tape instead of glue. It's working well so far! Also, St. Nicholas Center has a lot of coloring sheets, puzzles, matching games, etc. Just click on the For Kids on the menu options.
This is such a great idea! We leave chocolate coins in the children's shoes every eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, but this is so much better. I'm just hoping I can figure out what I'm supposed to link to–love your blog!
They really turned out beautifully! Thank you for sharing so many wonderful resources- we also love using your Little Flower scrapbook pages! I also have 6 little ones (11 years – 19 months) and this drasticallly cuts down on my prep time. Thank you 🙂
Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing!! I have group of young people that I am celebrating St. Nicholas day with tomorrow and these are perfect. I have printed them and have already started cutting them out. I am going to have to come and check out the other ones later! 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing the documents. I was wanting to do something like this, but I do not have the skills to figure out how to. I was able to make a St. Nick book mark with a prayer for the girls last year, but that's as much as I can do. Thank you so much for doing all this work and being willing to share with us. God bless your Advent and Christmas season.
The kids loved these!!!!! And they were super easy to put together. God Bless you!
Thank you Jessica, it's so lovely of you to share your hard work with us. These images will make many of us mother's work during Advent so much easier. May God bless you, your family & your new little bub.
Jessica, thank you for the template for these coins – I love them! I have already made the coins for this year but there's only so much circle cutting I can do with a scissors! Do you use any circle cutter/rotary cutter and if so, could you recommend it? I've looked for them on Amazon but some of the reviews aren't great. Thanks so much! Seana
Jessica, My parish has a Christmas Bazaar every November. Would it be OK to sell the coins for the parish (ie not for personal profit)? Sincerely, Denise (PS I found you through Pinterest). dmuir(at)gmail.com
I sent you an email, but it was returned so I'm not sure if you got it, Denise. That's fine. Thanks for checking. God bless!
Thanks for sharing. I too would love to know how you go about cutting these out.
I've used scissors (time consuming) or circle hole punches. I have this one for 1 1/2" circles and this one for 1" circles.
I am going through all archives to print out templates and wanted to know if the coin printables (Saint Nicholas, O Antiphons, etc.) are available to download in Drop Box?
Thank you!
Thank you for the reminder! I just finished uploading the documents to Dropbox and updated all the links. Let me know if you have any trouble downloading them. 🙂
Thank you so very much for sharing your documents! This is brilliant, btw.
Thank you so very much for sharing your wonderful creation!!
Thank you so much for creating and sharing these! So beautiful and special!
I always love your Christmas recommendations. I get so many great ideas every year.
I know this post is 11 years old, but it is still blessing many Catholic families. Thank you for sharing your gifts and still keeping these files available. God bless you and your family!