the long night

"White, white the stillness of starlight on the snow...."



Tonight we celebrated the Long Night, part of our week-long recognition of the Winter Solstice (which occurs around 1am tomorrow morning).



This afternoon the kids made lanterns for our "Mid-Winter's Journey." I stole this idea from my pal, Kyra, over at This Mom, (where you can find actual instructions on how to do this!), who has a knack for choosing the sorts of crafts that even MY non-crafty kids want to participate in. (Look at Zoo Boy going to town on his lantern!!) Look for more Kyra-inspired crafts from my kids this winter!

As a quick aside, I do feel the need to brag that I managed to resist the urge to run out and buy matching canning jars, a bottle of modge podge, a length of leather and a few beads so I could do it JUST like Kyra did. (That would be SO me!) Instead, I scrounged around the house, found just enough glass jars kicking around, actually found 3 sheets of tissue paper, and used white glue mixed with water instead of an actual craft glue. For handles, I found some picture-hanging wire and managed to rig up something that actually held while the kids swung the lanterns around. Hooray for me!

And here they are, complete with tea lights in the bottom. I'm pretty thrilled with how they came out, and the kids were just over the moon about it. After dinner, they happily scrambled into their warm clothes and bolted out the door while The Map Man prepared a little bonfire for lighting in our driveway (typically we'd do that sort of thing in the pasture, but there's still about a foot of crusty snow on the ground, and we weren't looking to lose any of our kids in a drift tonight....).

With lanterns in hand, we walked down the drive, singing the song from "Mid-Winter's Journey" (the Enki Solstice story we read over the past 3 nights). My plan was to only go that far, light the bonfire, read a story, and head back inside. But the kids didn't think just walking down the drive was any sort of journey. So we headed up the street. Finally I turned us back towards home (amid a duly noted protest from Zoo Boy -- he wanted to keep going. You know, the boy that tires out walking more than about 100 yards....). I'm wondering if any of our neighbors happened to look out their windows and catch up walking up and down the road, singing and humming, swinging lanterns. Really, I would have rather we could have done it along a woods road. But again, that pesky white stuff on the ground prevented a more nature setting for our journey.

Finally we got back to our property and lit our bonfire. I read "A Solstice Story", adapted by Ellen Jackson from a Cherokee tale of creation, which explains why the Evergreens are green all year round. It jived SO nicely with the "Mid-Winter's Journey" story, as well as the songs we've been using in our movement circle. I love it when things pull together like that! Makes me feel so, I dunno, competent. Good feeling! Anyway, we sang a round of "Oh, Evergreen", then enjoyed the fire and each other's company for awhile. Eventually the fire started dying down and we all started to feel the chill of the night, so we sang our journeying song on our way back to the house, then extinguished the lanterns before we went in.

Nice evening! Tomorrow we'll celebrate the return of the sun with some traditional Yule festivities.