Michaelmas Celebration

Yesterday we celebrated Michaelmas, which is one of the four cornerstone festivals in Waldorf traditions (along with Christmas, Easter and St. John's Tide). Archangel Michael has conquered Lucifer (the dragon) and thrown him down from the Heaven, and this festival helps us gather our inner strength before long winter to conquer our own inner dragons. St. George is thought of as the Earthly representative of Archangel Michael, so his story is often told during this week. Since this is our first year of celebrating it, we kept it simple. I made the Dragon bread and told Kitten the Harvest Loaf story as I made the dough using the recipe and the story in "All Year Round".

The ingredients are added one by one as the story unfolds, for example the frothy yeast mixture is the dragon that destroys the land (flour), sugar and salt is the ice and egg yolk is the sunlight that Archangel Michael throws down from the sky to help people. Kitten really liked the story.

Here is our dragon before baking (I know, he looks a lot like a dinosaur!)

He got quite puffier with baking but tasted great and Kitten ate three slices with butter and milk thus conquering her dragon :)

I also decorated a regular candle with a dragon using modeling beeswax. This is the first time I've worked with it and my sculpting skills can definitely be worked on but I love how it turned out and even my husband was impressed. The flame represents a sword with which Archangel Michael conquers the dragon (as the candle burns).

I tried telling Kitten the story of St. George but she was not interested, she is still quite young for it. I plan to make the dragon and other figures for next year and then tell it properly.

It is amazing how festive I felt the whole afternoon even with such simple actions. Perhaps it was because suddenly a thunderstorm started, it finally felt like fall (it is still 100 degrees down here!), and the smell of baking bread and beeswax along with candle light ought to make you feel good. Fall is definitely my favorite season and yesterday was a great start for it.

St. John's Day celebration

We did not do anything fancy, being away from home and all but I did want to start some traditions going this year. So I made this simple centerpiece with a big golden candle, seashells, rose petals and waterlilies, the lilies being the most exciting part. I found directions in All Year Round and they are closed to start with but when you put them to float in water they slowly spread their petals and look so life-like (well, except for the rainbow one but I couldn't resist)! Even my Dad (who is kind of a mad scientist) was impressed.

We had Berry pudding for dessert, which was very simple but good. It was basically just layers of Italian bread and fresh berries - raspberries, blueberries and strawberries - pureed with sugar, all covered with sweetened whipped cream (after being left to soak overnight).

We left some treats for fairies to dine on after their ball: honey to drink, blueberries and caramel to eat, all served in mother-of-pearl dishes with rose petals for chairs and vases.

In the morning we found that fairies left a piece of moonlight and starlight in the vases (in the forms of Swarovski crystals). I really enjoyed celebrating this day for the first time and hopefully next year, when Kitten is older, we will add some more traditions.

Summer Solstice

Yesterday was Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year and to celebrate it we decided to make the Father Sun loaf. Next time I will probably only take a third of the recipe because it turned out HUGE (you can see how the rays are overflowing on top and bottom, I did not have any big square pans), but it was kind of appropriate for the Sun. It was delicious and we froze two thirds of it to enjoy later. Kitten especially was impressed with the loaf and kept asking for "more Sun with butter". I have to admit, I enjoyed sculpting it and did not expect it to turn out nearly as good (so humble, I know!). I can see many many bread sculptures in my future. But, to the recipe (you can use any bread recipe but this is the one I chose).

Ingredients:
1 packet (or 2 1/4 tsp) yeast
1 cup warm water or milk (I used milk)
1 tsp honey
6-9 cups flour (the recipe says 6 but I ended up using 9 to get the proper consistency, I used 2 cups whole wheat and the rest white flour)
2 tsp salt
3 cups water
1/3 cup honey (the end result was just a little sweeter than regular bread, so you may want to add some more sugar)
1/3 cup oil or melted butter (I used butter)
Optional raisins, nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, spices, garlic, etc. (I used dried cranberries, crushed walnuts, cinnamon and nutmeg).

Proof the yeast in 1 cup of milk and honey until it gets bubbly. This should take about 15 minutes. Mix water, salt, honey and oil/butter in another bowl.

Add yeast mixture to liquids and allow the child with wooden spoon to stir while you add flour one cup at a time until it is too hard to stir.

Add your spices while the dough is still pretty liquid and nuts/fruits when it is more dense.

Get your hands messy by mixing/kneading the rest in by hand. The consistency should be pretty dense and not sticky, your hands should be able to stay clean and not covered with stuck dough. Knead for a while until the dough is smooth and shiny. It took me about 20 minutes but I am sure it could have used some more kneading, my hands got tired.

Put the dough in a clean bowl with a small amount of oil in it and cover with a damp towel. Allow to rise until it doubles in size.
Punch down, make the Sun or loaves or whatever you fancy and allow to rise again. I divided the dough in halves, made a circle from one half, pinched small pieces from another half, rolled them to make facial features, adding cranberries for eyes and then pinched off bigger pieces, rolled them into balls, stuck them all the way around the sun and pulled them into rays. I did this step without Kitten's help because I wanted a specific result but next time I will allow her to shape it too.
Bake in preheated to 350F oven for 40 min or so depending on the size of the loaves.

May Day celebration

Since Kitten's birthday falls on May Day, I did not do anything extra in addition to our birthday celebration. However, I did make a couple of decorations, that I wanted to share with you. On our nature table the grotto was replaced with a maypole. To make it I took a dowel, finished it with my beeswax-oil finish, glued 6 rainbow colored ribbons on top, using a hot glue gun, and added several paper flowers from Hobby Lobby. They have long wire stems and I just wound them under the ribbons on the pole. It is positioned in a ceramic pot filled with stones and covered with moss.

I also made another hanging decoration instead of the cockerel, the dancers around the Maypole. The flowers on the wreaths are made with scrunched tissue paper.

Easter celebration

We had a very happy Easter at our house! My sister came for a 2-day visit and it was very nice for Kitten to get to know her better. On Saturday we finished dying blown eggs and dyed some real ones using onion skins and leaves to make prints (you just put a leaf on the egg, cover it with a piece of nylon stocking and tie it). I made Kulich (Russian Easter bread) and Paskha (pronounced pAs-ha, which is also a Russian name for Easter and is a farmer cheese dessert, made in a shape of a mountain). In the evening, after Kitten went to bed, my sister and I decorated the Easter tree with blown eggs and butterflies (it came out oh so pretty if I say so myself, I am a poor photographer but trust me, in real life it is much better) and transformed the Lenten garden with life.

On Good Friday I placed a caterpillar made of green playdough, wrapped in white fabric, in the grotto. And on the Easter morning it was gone and instead an unusually bright red butterfly was flying above the grotto. I made an egg candle using beeswax. Wheat grass sprouted, thankfully, right on time. The lambs are made of wool, but I will show them in a separate post as I am quite proud of them.

Kitten was very excited to find the transformed Nature table in the morning. She received her Easter gifts - an Ostheimer bunny that you can see next to the grotto above, little gnomes with sleeping beds complete with pillows, and rainbow ribbon rings (both these gifts were made using tutorials from WeeFolkArt).

My friend came over with her daughter, Kitten's best friend, and we had a lovely Easter breakfast and a play date. We were so occupied that I did not remember to take any pictures, oops! 

I hope that you all had an equally pleasant Easter!

Tie-Dye Easter Eggs

The idea comes from Family Fun Magazine but I modified it slightly to get more flowing aquarelle colors, so I will describe what I did. This is another idea of dying eggs that is fairly easily managed with a toddler.
1. I used blown eggs because I don't like how food coloring may seep through the shell and color eggs that you are going to eat. Put a colander in a deep dish, put your egg inside and splash it with some vinegar.

2. Put 2-3 drops of food coloring on the egg while gently swirling it around in the colander.

3. If you want to achieve blended soft colors do not wait and put another color, trying to get the complete coverage. If you wait between colors about 30-60 seconds the colors will have some time to set and the result will be more spotted. You can try adding 3rd color (yellow would work the best as it is less likely to mud the colors). For best results use primary colors or colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.

4. Let sit for a minute and rinse gently. Some color will wash off. Let dry on a paper towel or a wooden skewer.

Palm Sunday celebration

Yesterday we celebrated Palm Sunday. We are not really religious here, so I was wondering how to incorporate Easter into our year cycle. Fortunately, the All Year Round book explained the meaning of this festival from Waldorf point of view and now I have no hesitations. I love how Waldorf system looks at religion - it leaves the question of faith to you and relates religion to Nature, something people experienced and tried to explain to themselves for millennia. Easter is just the celebration of birth, of renewal, of spring. And Resurrection of Christ is a symbol of that, so you can decide for yourself whether to talk to kids about it at all. I just explained to Kitten (even though she is so young that no explanation is really necessary) that we are doing what we are doing because the morning is almost here.

The cockerel is a symbol of morning everywhere, so naturally he heralds the coming of Christ and the beginning of the new covenant.

On our Nature table this week will be the Lenten garden with a small grotto, stone path, lake on the hill, tree branch in a dish of earth and 6 small candles. We will light and burn one candle before bedtime until Friday. Saturday is a day of silence.

We also made bread cockerels. The recipe I used was from All Year Round but I guess you could use any yeast dough. If somebody is interested, I can write the recipe here. This is how they looked before baking. I used raisins for eyes and cloves for feet.

And here they are right out of the oven. They were delicious, Kitten was very excited about her bread being shaped like this.

Palm Sunday

Easy Easter egg coloring for toddlers

This is not very satisfying for adults because the result is not very exciting but this is probably the easiest way to color eggs with a toddler. This is also good fine motor practice, much more so than the dipping method.
You need tissue paper that bleeds well, I got ours at Michaels and it was called "Bleeding tissue paper" but not all colors bled well, if at all, so you need to experiment.
Pour some water and a little bit of vinegar into several small jars. Use one jar for each color you are using. For best results use similar colors for one egg, for example blue-purple-red, or light green-yellow, etc. We used red-orange-yellow. Tear (and let your child do it too) small pieces of tissue paper, dip them in water and put on the egg (we used blown eggs and I had to make sure Kitten does not squeeze too hard, the girl loves eggs!).

Continue with different colors until the whole egg is covered.

For best results try to tear smaller pieces. Let dry and peel paper off.

(As you can see, my pieces were too big)

Our orange did not bleed at all, so I dyed it with orange food coloring, which eliminated all white spots and did not change red and yellow, which I was very surprised and pleased about. The result is not fantastic beauty-wise but Kitten enjoyed the process very much, which was my goal. I will make the pretty ones when she is asleep.

April Fool's Day

The custom of playing tricks on April Fool's Day goes back more than 200 years. It commemorates the birthday, on April 1st 1752, of Olaf Toyou, the first-born son of Hungarian fisherfolk. When Olaf was nearly 6 months old, on September 12th 1752, a violent earthquake struck far out in the Mediterranean. Olaf was sleeping in a cradle slung from the branch of a tree, while his mother mended nets nearby.

The turbulent sea raced up the beach so swiftly and quietly that the mother noticed nothing until it was too late. She ran to save her son but all she found in the cradle was a small fish.

Demented, the mother searched for her husband, shrieking that the baby had gone. While her back was turned, a second tidal wave miraculously returned the baby to the cradle and retrieved the fish. When the husband inspected the cradle and found the boy, wet but unharmed, he berated his wife as a fool. She, however, remained convinced that her child had the power to turn himself into a fish at will.To the derision of everyone on that stretch of the coast she insisted on calling him Olaf 'Pilor" - which means Olaf the Little Pilchard.
To this day, people in France must beware of turning their backs on April 1st… they may later discover a paper fish pinned to their jacket and realize with embarrassment that they have become the 'Poisson d'Avril' ('April Fish').
There is one way to avoid becoming an April Fool: it is said that to hang a little cradle, carrying a fish, around your neck, or at the front door, will protect you and your family.


Taken from All Year Round by Ann Druitt


I made a cradle from a bird's nest (those nests are handy, let me tell you!) with some unspun wool and hung it from a tree branch on our nature table. The baby is a tiny Waldorf doll, which I made some time ago. I cut the fish out of double wool felt and blanket stitched around it, embroidering the eyes and stuffing it with wool. I told Kitten the story, using blue play silk for a wave and she loved it (even more she loved playing with the little fish and putting it to bed).