Snapshots: Here It Comes

Christmas approaches, and the whole house shows it. 

Poppy put one of these in every room. Not particularly decorative, but a good message.

I learned this week that our priest has no Christmas decorations. He said that last year, he found a two-foot tree at the rectory and put that on his dining room table. Without ornaments or anything. And that was his decoration. He mentioned that now that his brother is living there too, he should probably decorate a little more.

You think?

I was depressed by the idea of a bare plastic tree being the only "decoration" in a house. The children were scandalized that a priest of all people had no actual Christmas decorations. So we did something about it.

I don't have a lot of decorations myself, which meant I couldn't just give him something extra of mine. I did have some trimmings from the bottom of our tree, though, with which I made this for his door.

 I don't even attempt wreaths. I don't know what you call this, but it looks festive, anyway.

Poppy, meanwhile, set to work making a paper chain and star for the tree. She was home by herself most of this week. Her brothers were at school helping the teachers move into our new school (yay!), but the younger children were kept at home so as to be out of the way. Poppy was not pleased to be home without anyone to play with, so I really appreciated this project that kept her occupied all of one morning.

The internet told me that a two-foot tree would require a chain of 9-12 feet in length. That seemed way too long to me, but by the time Poppy had used all her paper strips, she had a chain 11.5 feet long.

And there's the star, too.

Father sent a picture of his decorated tree for Poppy.

I think this is more like three feet tall, which means it needs another few feet of chain, but oh well.

She was very pleased with this.

Another project I had been saving to do with Poppy and that we did this week was making candles from all the stubs of blessed candles from church. Because they were blessed, they either had to be burned or buried. Or, I decided, made into new candles.

I bought some silicone candle molds and a kit that contained wicks, stickers and frames (I guess that's what you call them) to hold the wicks in place, a pot to melt the wax, and a small spoon to stir the wax.

The spoon was also useful to fish out the wicks from the stubs.

I liked the hexagonal molds.

Getting the cooled candles out of the molds required some effort, but I did it, and now we have new candles.

Fun.

Unusually, we've had clouds in the morning lately, and that has meant some pretty spectacular sunrises.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.