season's greetings

From our family to yours, a very merry holiday! Maybe one of these days I'll get around to actually mailing these cards. But don't hold your breath....

bright nights

My mom and I took the kids to see a commercial lights display last night, here's some photo from our trip. Funny how hard it is to get pictures of something with so much light! (Of course, the fact that I took these all with my phone might explain some of it....). Anyway, it's enough to get an idea of what we were oohing and aahing at last night:

tree decorating

yuletide greetings

We celebrated the Return of the Light, our Yule celebration, yesterday. We put up the tree the kids and The Map Man brought home on Saturday and decorated it with edible ornaments (I'll post pictures soon), which will remain with the tree when we move it outdoors for the birds to enjoy next weekend. (We'll add other edibles for the birds at that time too, and we still need to make gingerbread cookies to add now -- we had a slight butter problem so couldn't do the cookies today as planned.) We also created and decorated this festive gingerbread tree.

The most important job of the day was decorating our Yule log. Here Zoo Boy adds some greenery (trimmed from our tree).










J helps The Map Man add some fresh fruit -- cranberries and kumquats -- to our log.










Our finished Yule log in the fireplace, waiting to be lit. We ate our holiday feast picnic-style in front of the fire.









After dinner the boys discovered gifts in the tree. "Who put the gifts in the tree, Mommy?" both boys asked. I shrugged my shoulders. "I dunno, who do you think?" Zoo Boy guessed that they were there along and they just missed seeing them when they picked the tree out. J didn't believe that, but didn't offer his own guess. We each got a woodland animal finger puppet -- J got a raccoon, Zoo Boy got a fox, The Map Man got a skunk, and I got a porcupine. The kids spent the rest of the evening playing with the puppets in and around the tree, and enjoying the warmth of our Yule log, and our family.

What a wonderful weekend!

the Long Night

solstice preparations

In preparation for our observance of the Long Night, we made some upgrades to our Solstice Lanterns from last year. We added yellow, to represent the light, to our blue and purple based lanterns. (These lanterns are simple glass jars decorated with tissue paper held on by Modge Podge.)


Then we rolled beeswax candles to light our lanterns. Here's Zoo Boy's candle prior to trimming the wick and cutting the candle down to size to fit his lantern.










J trims the wick on his candle, while The Map Man works on rolling his in the background.











Meanwhile, I rolled and decorated our "sun candle", the first candle to be lit in our ceremony. I used the verse from "Mid-Winter Journey" as the inspiration in my design -- the candle is white (like starlight on the snow), it is ringed with budding greed plants (like the life that waits again to grow), and there is a red heart (that guides the way we go). And of course, a sun.

mid-winter journey

White, white, the stillness

Of starlight on the snow.

Green, green, the flowering life

That waits again to grow.

Red, red, the tender heart

That guides the way we go

Under the starlight and over the snow.

-from "Mid-winter Journey", Enki Education Kindergarten Nature Story

This week we read the 3-part nature story "Mid-Winter Journey", about a boy's quest to save a huge evergreen tree. We read it over the course of 3 days, and created a wool board story as our creative digestion activity.

We started by wet-felting green dyed wool batts. We laid the batt in a cookie sheet, put the cookie sheet in the tub, covered with soapy hot water, then agitated the wool until it felted. (The cookie sheet helped it stay together while we were agitating it.)

Then we rinsed out the felt and let it dry. J's felt is on the left, Zoo Boy's on the right. Zoo Boy didn't want to touch the wet wool, so he used the bottom of a cup to agitate the wool. I helped him with it as well, but in the end J's wool felted more evenly due to his extra attention to it.


Then the boys cut the felt into the shape of evergreen trees and arranged them on the wool board.










Our finished wool board picture -- in addition to the evergreen forest (the large tree in the center is the one the boy strove to save), there is the scarlet bird and the bear that the boy stopped to save, and the cabin where the old woodcutter he helped brought him.