This holiday season I decided to focus on the values of “gratefulness, enoughness, thoughtfulness, and flexibility.”
I don’t feel the need to rush since we celebrate both Winter Solstice and the Advent-Epiphany run. That covers Dec 1 – Jan 6!
This morning Paul commented on our small effort last night to get into the spirit of things.
P: When did that happen?
C: In between bath and homework last night I let her start small.
P: I didn’t notice.
C: Yup. You didn’t. Make sure to notice later when I fish out the nativity people and let her do that.
A while back I had let Julia choose new decor bits at Target and once she discovered the people, it was easy enough to steer her toward simple trees to go with. I wish I had more time for crafting, but I don’t. That’s the reality of modern parenting — time is precious. Hence the enoughness and flexibility.
I don’t think this is the year that we’ll add the Advent wreath to the process. She’s still young, though I’m not as worried about candle flames like last year. We may think about making a wooden holder for next year, but if not we have all year to make it.
I told her the Holly King and Oak King story and Julia wanted to know why they have to fight over the sun. I told her it was simply a story to explain how the sun is changing. I wasn’t ready to get deeper into that line… it was enough to introduce it. Since I’m not introducing anything new for Advent like the advent wreath, we’ll delve deeper into the nativity story and touch bits I didn’t get to last year.
“Layering and lots of hands on” tends to be my approach to her faith development.
We spent some time online looking at them.
I liked this one:
She liked that one:
Eventually we came to an agreement on what felt colors were needed to make our own Holly King and Oak King to lurk in our forest. The twins would both have brown bodies but the Holly King would get a red cloak and the Oak King would get a green one.
We’ll be adapting and using this pattern to make them but a lot of the others look fun too. We made the flower ones for Thanksgiving/ Autumn.
