Holiday Gifts

This Holiday Season I am focusing more on experiences, creating traditions for the little ones, and slowing down instead of material things, and the stress of the typical holiday rush, rush, rush.

A few of the experiences we have done or are planning to do include: a nature walk in our woods gathering holiday greenery and decorating our house, a week of stories about St. Nicholas, concluding with a few treasures found in their shoes, a trip to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens to see the lights, a spiral walk with friends, a St. Nicholas/Santa Lucia celebration at a friends house, baking saffron rolls and a week of Santa Lucia stories, The Charlottesville Holiday Bizarre trip with friends, a Yule celebration with friends, our own Yule celebration with a few presents, a trip downtown to see the lights and the trains, and four weeks celebrating advent with a little story about the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms for each of their weeks, a Christmas meal with my grandmother, mother and father and a few more presents, and baking "holiday festive foods" instead of bread on our weekly "baking day". I'd like to add a day of sledding, snowman building and snow angels to the list!  As magical as I think all of the above things are, I was just truly gifted with one experience that trumps them all!  A friend of mine's son wanted to pawn his cello to by his mother a gift this year, touched by the sentiment she posted this on Facebook, where another friend of her's suggested he busk downtown to earn money instead, which gave me the wonderful idea of hiring him to do a concert for our playgroup and other friends and family.  The idea morphed into a wonderful afternoon, we are going to set up tree stumps around a bonfire, where he will play some holiday songs for us, then his mother, a Waldorf teacher, is going to do a puppet show based on the Chinese tale "The Rabbit and the Carrot" from the book "Spring" , then we will have some light refreshments and free play and conclude with a walk around our spiral.  I am so excited I just know the children are going to love this so much more than any toy I could give them.

At this age a huge influx of toys and gifts would just overwhelm them and my children (as I'm sure every parent feels) have far too much!

I made each of the little one's a special blanket, they each are getting a tin of beeswax block crayons, a special book, and a new set of Stockmar watercolors to share. Kiera is getting a cute little wooden tea set, and I am making her a collection of felt tea bags, and Eoghan is getting a little gnome tree fort from Willodel with some peg doll gnomes I made.

Hoping for a simple, nourishing holiday season. Shared with our beautiful friends and family.

Even the littles Need to take a moment to rest.  We just collected some greens to decorate our home with on a longer than usual nature walk.