December 1st is the day that we traditionally begin to celebrate the red & green season of Christmas. Here are a few things we did today:
The kids started opening their Advent calendars. This year, JediBoy has the hard-to-find Lego Castle Advent Calendar, which started with a smirking knight, and BabyGirl has a wooden open-the-door variety with a Hershey kiss in each cubby.
This weekend, I wrapped 24 picture books about Christmas from our collection, and the kids will open one each day. It’s a $2.99 roll of wrapping paper that makes the holiday books seem exciting and new!
This morning, since today is also Jan Brett’s birthday, the holiday book was the fantastic Jan Brett’s Christmas Treasury. We adore this collection of seven great picture books, including The Mitten, The Wild Christmas Reindeer, The Trouble with Trolls, The Christmas Trolls, The Hat, The Twelve Days of Christmas and Twas the Night Before Christmas. Jan Brett’s illustrations are gorgeous and full of detail - we read “Trouble with Trolls” twice, once for the main storyline and a second time to focus on the illustrations at the bottom of the pages showing Hedgie the Hedgehog making himself comfortable in the Trolls’ home.
You might notice the other book in the picture is Mucumber McGee and the Half-Eaten Hot Dog which, mainly because it features a hot dog, is BabyGirl’s current favorite book that follows her everywhere.
I had a PDF file of the animals from “The Mitten,” and last night I stitched up a white felt mitten so the kids could act out the story as we read it.
Another thing we do every year on December 1st is to make our red-and-green Christmas countdown chains, with 24 links each. JediBoy did his independently this year (after I cut the construction paper into strips with my paper cutter) and BabyGirl was an enthusiastic glue-putter-on-er while I held the links in place.
Each night at bedtime, the kids will rip one link off the chain, singing:
One more link, one more link,
One more off the chain.
Soon it will be Christmas time,
Christmas time again! Yay!
to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” This song came to us through my mom’s best friend, who was a kindergarten teacher when we were growing up. My sister and I made these chains every December 1st of our childhoods.
I had a huge stack of half-size strips cut too, hoping to encourage the kids to make garlands for decoration. BabyGirl was content to continue gluing for me, but JediBoy didn’t seem inspired. Instead, he used the paper to make two rings (one for me and one for PisecoDad) and a holiday necklace.
We also started listening to our Christmas music (today was Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, because BabyGirl likes his version of “Jingle Bells”) and watching our Christmas movies (A Garfield Christmas).
We did lots of other non-holiday things today too. We hadn’t done a chapter in The Story of the World last week, and I noticed over the weekend that JediBoy was reading the book on his own. Today he thumped it into my hands and we went over Chapter 20: Greeks Get Civilized Again. The chapter includes a retelling of the Cyclops story from the Odyssey, which he loved. (Any good graphic novel abridgments of the Odyssey out there?) JediBoy drew a picture of the Cyclops and also illustrated a Greek wrestling match. We did the map work, and he read Hour of the Olympics (Magic Tree House #16). He read a few other chapter books in the morning - two Geronimo Stiltons and a Pokemon book. We reviewed his x5 facts and went over the first unit test from Math U See Gamma. We watched the first dvd of Muzzy II in Spanish. JediBoy asked for a game he didn’t know how to play yet, so I picked Sequence, which he enjoyed.
We did not do Muffin Tin Monday today, mainly because I am oversensitive about hand-washing this week. My kids decided to add a third color into our celebrations: pink as in pink-eye.
JediBoy in particular seems to have a bad case of it, and I’m afraid we’ll have to miss tomorrow’s great planned field trip because we’ll be too contagious. Send great pink-eye-healing vibes our way, please, in the hopes that we all wake up miraculously healed in the morning.
