Advent Activity Bags

I did these last year and I’m doing them again with a few modifications to make it run more smoothly!

Last year I was heavy on the home-made, time-intensive activity options, this year I am reining it in and replacing them with activities that are easier and quicker to pull together and less daunting for me!

I browsed my Christmas Pinterest board for ideas again but also used some things that are unique to our family….

• ·         Write letters to Santa (we do this on the 1^st to give me time to rustle up their request if at all possible…. They ask for one thing for them, one for someone they love and something for the whole world)
• ·         Make Christmas biscuits (ambiguous enough so that if I feel like putting together the ingredients for the Rudolph cupcakes I can, or if it boils down to cookie cutters and butter biscuits that fits too!)
• ·         Set up for a party (we aren’t spending Christmas with my parents this year so will be having a special pre-Christmas rendevue with nibbles and drinks to exchange gifts)
• ·         Visit the Christmas market (an annual special event to ride the enormous old carousel, browse the shops and eat hot-dogs by the fountain!)
• ·         Make hot chocolate with marshmallows in (Idris LOVES hot chocolate so this is for him!)
• ·         Make a gingerbread house (with the kit from Ikea – told you I wasn’t doing homemade this year!)
• ·         Visit Hooties to look at the lights (a warehouse near us with a darkened area for trees, lights and inflatable decorations)
• ·         Lolly stick snowflakes
• ·         Paper village scene for the windows
• ·         M and m’s nativity poems – make to give to friends
• ·         Call some family to wish them the best of the season
• ·         Decorate oranges with cloves and ribbons
• ·         Make candy cane mice
• ·         Make thank you notes ready to go (these will cover all the children in one – separate ones have proved over ambitious to get sent out in the past!)
• ·         Take a box of food to the food bank
• ·         Make oreo-pops
• ·         Hama bead snowflakes
• ·         Make paper chains
• ·         Make mince pies
• ·         Make paper snowflakes
• ·         Make strawberry santas
• ·         Toast marshmallows on the fire
• ·         Decorate the tree (always done mid-December the day after Daddy’s birthday)
• ·         Hang up the stockings!

Apart from the few things that are date fixed like decorating the tree and writing letters, I have made a little stack of the papers in the cupboard and I will pick one to go in every day depending on whether I have the resources needed or the energy required!!

The bags came from Ikea last year, and they have three chocolates in each of them from a variety of Christmas chocolates that I found around and about…. This year’s new addition is a Christmas joke in each bag – I had a real giggle finding jokes to write out and I know the girls will find them hilarious, especially Faith, our resident joker!

I’d love to hang them all down the banister with the tinsel and the lights but last year Idris quickly worked out that they contain fun things to eat and I fear that all the chocolates would get scoffed in a day if I did so they are in the dresser to be drip fed!!

An Advent Calendar of Activities!

Inspired by my sister-in-law and by these bags that I found in Ikea today (apologies for the upside down photo, I am getting to grips with drop box and an android phone - bear with me!), I have put together an advent of activities for the children and us to enjoy throughout December. I downloaded printable Christmassy labels and edited them to show all of the activities that I have come up with. I have more than 24 as I plan to tweak both the order and the activity in the bag to suit the day and the circumstances! I think that I'm going to hang them down our beautiful banister rail so they will look really decorative as well as being their advent calendar. I'm not as organised as my sister-in-law as I haven't yet GOT all the ingredients and materials needed but there's plenty of time for that! This was very spur of the moment but I had no trouble thinking of things as we always do quite a few fun activities in December and I have been thinking about doing this for several years now! Events just collided to make me do it this year! Thanks Lorri and Ikea! Here is our list - some are specific to our area, and some are general!

• Shop for Christmas gifts for the children at The Haven
• Put up and decorate the tree (always on the 14th after Daddy's Birthday!!)
• Make mini gingerbread houses (a work in progress as we can't get graham crackers here and that was the idea that I saw....... watch this space!)
• Go Ice skating or to snow play, depending on deals and offers!
• Go for a walk to see the lighted houses near Granny and Grandpa's house
• Make marshmallows
• Make new ornaments for the tiny Christmas trees and decorate the trees
• Make ice-candles
• Make ice-cream cone Christmas trees to eat
• Treat the birds
• Decorate the Christmas cake
• m&m's Christmas story
• Christmas tree play dough
• Write letters to Santa (something for me, something for someone else, something for the world)
• Make reindeer food
• Learn a new Christmas carol
• Make hand print ornaments
• Make paper chains (we always do this, it's a tradition in our house!)
• Make lolly stick snowflakes for the walls
• Have a family pow-wow and say nice things about each other - write them down to keep!
• Make mince pies and give to the local people we know who are in need (Jack (92) is first on the list, he always carried a boneo in his pocket for our dog, and he was the only person she never barked at as she rushed out to sit and beg waiting for her treat then scuttled off again without a backward glance - pure cupboard love but we have come to love Jack and after a bout of pneumonia earlier this year, we no longer see him take his daily walk and we miss him!)
• Go to the Christmas tree festival at Church
• Make paper snowflakes
• Enjoy hot chocolate with all the trimmings!

I might pop the odd sweet or chocolate in there to make the children giggle, like red smarties for Rudolph's nose and chocolate coated raisins for reindeer poo! I'm really happy I did this this year and I'm looking forwards to it! Have fun making yours!

Christmassy Fun!

Decorating the tree..... we go for an eclectic 'collected over the years' look, ranging from baubles Dewi and I found in the attic of the first flat we rented together, to home-made ones the girls crafted and everything in-between!

Yes, Dewi does have a mohawk..... don't ask..... at least it isn't blue..... yet!

Faith demonstrated the Christmas jack-in-the-box to Idris - he's a bit young to understand it right now - he just looked surprised! Faith found it hysterically funny when she was about 8 months old!

Idris exhausted by all the merriment - that is the dog's stocking hanging in the back ground. It reads 'Santa I can explain' and makes me giggle every year!

Christingle - the sweeties on Faith's just made it to the end of the service!

The lights turned out in Church for 'this little light of mine' - Faith was very enthusiastic with her orange but managed not to torch anything or anyone!

Mince pies made with wholemeal flour pastry bound together with ginger cordial - very delicious if a little softer than normal pastry. They didn't make it past the one hour mark though so can't have been too bad!!!!

Snowflake Thank You Notes



Every year I have very good intentions of having the children write to say thank you for their presents but each year it somehow doesn't quite get done as I planned, with me doing most of the writing! It must seem an awfully daunting task to small children I think so this year I am planning ahead and making it achievable from the get-go!

I found these snowflake templates and edited them to carry a thank you message. They were then printed at half size, glued to sheets of card with lined paper glued to the back, enhanced with glitter glue and then cut out ready to go straight after Christmas!

Stamped Corndough Ornaments

We played around this week with a twist on the traditional salt dough ornaments. I had the idea from this picture of clay tablets on pinterest. Obviously ours aren't quite as sophisticated but we had fun and there is definitely promise there for the future too! The dough is the same one we made snowmen from, the recipe is here. I rolled it out to about 4mm thick and then used stamps and ink to print onto cutout shapes.

I thought that the ink was red but it came out this rather bright shade of pink (much to the girl's approval I might add!). They look rather effective I think, I really like the purple shade on the writing although the silver ink (the 'peace' ornament) didn't come out so well. They dried in a few hours in a very low oven and could do with a coat of clear varnish to seal them. From past experience, if you don't seal them, they go soggy if you live in a cold and/or humid house!

This is Eve making a set of place cards for the Christmas table with the little alphabet stamps, they came out great too! I'm thinking they could be great for making gift labels or adding a pretty touch to table centres and decorating themes!

Creative Christmas Presents!

This is a sneaky preview of a couple of the gifts that Eve and Faith have made this year! Eve is really creative and is always making something imaginative and to this end I re-styled the 'creation station' indoors for the Winter months. As before, it marries up Eve's need for access to 'stuff' to create with and my need for my home not to look like a shoe-makers offcuts bin! There are different things out indoors to match up with new interests, some re-discovered items and the fact that it is indoors now! I will take some pictures and get it up here to show you!

Anyhow, back to the post in hand! Eve was busily sewing away and Faith wanted in on the present giving feeling so she gathered some pretty items and some fabric and thread and packaged it all up to give to Auntie Anne so she could craft with it. I suggested as gently and tactfully as I could that maybe Auntie Anne didn't do much crafting and perhaps instead we could make something ready for her out of all the lovely things that she had chosen! I said that then I thought Auntie Anne would really treasure something that she had made. It was really fun to lay all the bits out (fabric, ribbon, a red rose, embroidery floss, stretchy thread and bells) and come up with the plan of a fabric Christmas tree with the bells as baubles, the stretchy thread and embroidery thread as tinsel and the red rose as the fairy at the top with a ribbon hanging loop. It was fairly simple for Faith to sew and looked really effective! It is now repackaged and under the tree ready for Auntie Anne!

Meanwhile Eve was busily sewing away a stocking for Idris. She cut the perfect wide shape and knew just how to sew it back to back and then turn it through before adding the little snowflakes! She's quite the little seamstress and I love watching her sew with my Nana's embroidery needles - my Nana made some really beautiful cross stitches and would have been thrilled that Eve is becoming a chip off the old block! Eve is apparently asking Santa for a sewing box for Christmas so watch this space for more 'needlework by Eve'!!

Exploring Advent With a Jesse Tree

I have wanted to do a Jesse Tree with the girls for a couple of years now - this year we finally got organised! Above is our simple tree made from apple twigs pruned from our lovely big apple tree. Below is Idris helping Eve to colour her symbol ready to hang on the tree. Yes, Idris is in a pink snuggle suit - I think it's wasteful to give away perfectly good snuggle suits just because they are pink!! Our house gets parky in the Winter and he is drooly so the more snugglies the better!!

 

Each night after bath time we gather around the table in dressing gowns and I read a chapter from Geraldine McCaughrean's The Jesse Tree. The plot is set with a grumpy old carpenter carving a traditional Jesse Tree in a church; an inquisitive boy on holiday visits him daily and asks insightful questions and begs for another story! Each day the carpenter grudgingly tells some more!

When the chapter is finished we talk about it and the girls colour the symbol that corresponds to the story. I printed these symbols - they don't match completely to the book (using an earth instead of the sun and moon for example) but in my recent spirit of quashing my perfectionism and getting stuck in, they do very nicely!! We stick them back to back on a red cardboard shape, thread a string then add them to the tree! The girls are really enjoying this!

Christmas Puddings!!

As per my October mission I have made Christmas puddings today.  I have vivid childhood memories of making puddings with my mother, with all the ingredients spread out across the dining room table, my mother measuring and us tipping and stirring!! I re-created that today for my own children and had friends come round too to share in the fun.  We did two rounds of pudding making and everyone went home happily clutching their pudding basin!! I was especially touched by one friend who had never made puddings as a child and never made them for herself as an adult.  She was so delighted to be making them, possibly more excited than the children!!

The recipe that we used is as follows:

•  225g/8oz golden caster sugar
• 225g/8oz vegetarian suet
• 340g/12oz sultanas
• 340g/12oz raisins
• 225g/8oz currants
• 110g/4oz candied peel
• 110g/4oz plain flour
• 110g/4oz fresh white breadcrumbs
• 55g/20z flaked almonds
• 1 lemon, zest only
• 5 eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 150 ml/5 fl oz brandy or rum.
• I also put in a bag of pecans as I love them in my pudding!

Mix together all the dry ingredients then stir in the beaten eggs and brandy well. Grease your pudding basins and spoon in the mix. Cover with baking parchment and foil (creased in the middle to allow for steam) and tie round with string/wool firmly. Steam for 5-6 hours.  I don't have a steamer so I put an up-turned bowl in the bottom of my soup pan and sit the pudding basin on top before filling to halfway up the pudding bowl and simmering for 5-6 hours as above. Cool the puddings then cover with fresh parchment and store in a cool cupboard until Christmas day! (recipe from BBC good food site originally but I can no longer find this particular one to link to)

Each of the children took a turn at stirring the pudding mix as we all said the 'pudding poem'......

Into the basin put the plums

Stir about, stir about, stir about!

Next the good white flour comes

Stir about, stir about, stir about!

Sugar and peel and eggs and spice
Stir about, stir about, stir about!

Mix them and fix them and cook them twice

Stir about, stir about, stir about!

(traditional poem)

Then each child (and adult!!) closed their eyes and made a wish as they stirred. it was so sweet to see the little ones squeeeeezing their eyes tight shut!!

I am pleased to have this done and we enjoyed doing it together. I had to set my alarm for 2am to turn the second pudding off which wasn't so fun but he house smelled divine!!