holiday traditions

The boys play yesterday afternoon at the children's museum prior to J's class. This week's class was about Holiday Traditions Around the World, and it was a gem of a class!! They cooked holiday treats from around the world, made holiday decorations from various traditions, and played holiday games from various countries. It was entirely hands-on, and looked like the kids had a blast!

That's J on the right, in the gray shirt, hard at work on one of his projects. I just love these museum classes -- the teachers put so much effort into making them a wonderful experience for the kids, and just look at that teacher-child ratio! There were only 3 kids in the class, yet the teacher had two teen-aged assistants! And enough craft materials for about 3 times that number of kids -- in fact, they let Zoo Boy participate in a few of the activities as well.


Some of the things that J created in the class. The teacher joked that the glitter glue on the bottom picture might dry by Christmas. He also came home with various yummies to eat, and a couple little booklets with holiday word games and the like in them, which he's been enjoying. And, his favorite thing, a dreidel and a small packet of chocolate coins:


So here are the kids playing the Dreidel game. J patiently tried to teach me the words for each of the symbols on the dreidel and what they meant. Zoo Boy thought the game was pretty great, because he kept winning chocolate coins! The first thing he wanted when he woke up this morning was to play Dreidel again.

Our own holiday tradition. Last night began our week-long Yule celebration. We are reading a 3-chapter Enki story called "Mid-Winter's Journey", one chapter each night (the 3 nights before the Winter Solstice) by the fire. On Friday, we will make lanterns, and Friday night (the night of the Solistice) we will take a lantern walk and make a bonfire, and read a story about the Solstice (based on the Cherokee tale of creation). On Saturday, we will decorate a Yule log, then burn it in the fireplace that night, pop popcorn (which we will string on our tree), and exchange small gifts.

Of course, Christmas and all the craziness that holiday brings will still come -- our families "do" Christmas in a big way, so there's just no avoiding that. So Santa will come and bring a couple things, and we'll get and give gifts at The Map Man's and my parents' house. But we're trying to shift the focus of our holidays to our own family tradition. So far I'm really happy with the results. When people ask if my kids are excited about the holidays, I can truthfully say "I'm sure they will be when they come!", but so far we've avoided them being whipped into a frenzy about it. Which, as you can imagine, is making for a nice, calm, peaceful week for us. And that brings out the cheerful holiday spirit in ME!