19Jan 2023 by catbird 2 Comments
Midwinter Nature Activities for Kids

Midwinter Nature Activities for Kids

Bath & Body, Craft Project, Midwinter, Nature Art, Recipes, Winter
Ten ways to celebrate the Midwinter with kids!! Pin for later! Click the pictures below for more info. (Tutorials for the candles and moon milk will be in my upcoming Midwinter guide!) Midwinter is an inward facing, puttering kind of celebration, in contrast to all of the pomp of the December holidays. It’s cleaning out the old and looking forward to the new-- spring, new gardens and days filled with light all while staying cozy and warm. You can celebrate by making soap, candles, tidying the house, pouring over seed catalogs, laying out garden plans, forcing branches or making traditional foods with milk, honey and seeds. It's a great time to practice hygge, taking pleasure in slower, simple things.
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18Jan 2023 by catbird 1 Comment
Edible Snowing Clouds for Midwinter

Edible Snowing Clouds for Midwinter

Craft Project, Midwinter, Nature Art, Recipes
This Midwinter project grew out of some research I was doing about the fairytale Frau Holle. Frau Holle is a classic Grimm's fairytale in which a mistreated step sister falls down a magical well to a fairy realm in which is rewarded for being kind to Frau Holle with gold. (There is of course also a "bad" sister who does everything wrong and is punished in proper Grimm fashion.) Frau Holle in the story needs help shaking her bed linens because the feather make snow in the mortal world. It's one of the more interesting fairytales I've read, and more so because Frau Holle features heavily in Grimm's non-fiction writing about Germanic folklore. Frau Holle is not just a fairytale, but an important goddess in the early Germanic pantheon. She…
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16Jan 2023 by catbird 1 Comment
Forcing Branches

Forcing Branches

Foraging, Midwinter, Nature Collection
A lovely way to celebrate Midwinter is to force winter tree branches. “Forcing” branches simply means that you bring them inside when it’s still cold outside which causes them to react to the warmth in your home and break bud earlier than they would have outside. If you live somewhere a little warmer you may be able to get some early flowers this way, (this is also a great way to start a lesson about the difference between flower buds and leaf buds on winter trees) but nearly everyone will be able to get some charming little green leaves. Willow is on of my favorite trees to force, not just because they are one of the easier trees to coax into an early leaf out, but because they also have…
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16Jan 2023 by catbird 3 Comments
A Valentine for the Birds

A Valentine for the Birds

Craft Project, Learning, Nature Art, Play, Valentine's Day
It probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise that we like to make valentine’s for the birds. (Both wild birds and our chickens, but our chickens are much easier to photograph) there are a ton of good reasons to celebrate birds at Valentine’s Day! 1. Even though February is often one of the coldest snowiest months for us, the days are getting lighter and the very first stirrings of spring are starting. There was a popular notion in England and France during the Middle Ages that birds started to look for their mates on February 14. The reason for this assumption is not clear, but might be related to the fact that the warbling of the first songbirds after a long winter started sometime in mid-February. Many birds also start…
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11Jan 2023 by catbird 2 Comments
Hibernation Party!!

Hibernation Party!!

Craft Project, Hibernation Celebration, Learning, Nature Art, Play, Winter
Maybe you've been learning about hibernation all week... maybe you just like a good party. Either way, a hibernation party is a ton of fun!! This is a great party to have with friends right before winter break (which is what we usually do) or a fun way to celebrate winter in January. Check out the Hibernation Celebration page for some more ways to learn about hibernation or just dive right into the snacks! Below there are ideas for: storing up for the winter (snacks), making your den cozy (activities) and training for hibernation (games). Store up for Winter Mobile Hibernation Snack Necklace One of the most important parts of hibernation is storing up tons of food and you never know when you might get hungry! Cue the mobile hibernation…
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09Jan 2023 by catbird 2 Comments
An After Holiday Tree for our Animal Friends

An After Holiday Tree for our Animal Friends

Nature Art, Play, Twelfth Night
I always feel a little down in early January after all of the excitement of teh December holidays. One thing that I have always kind of dreaded is taking the tree down. Over the last few years as we have started to celebrate the Twelfth Night however, it's become its own little celebration, which has completely changed how I feel about this time. It's become something to look forward to, rather than something to be sad about. In fact I have begun to enjoy taking the ornaments down and packing them away- when we put them up there are frantic little hands grabbing for them and bickering about who gets to hang the most. When I take them down I can reminisce about each of them. We make a family…
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06Jan 2023 by catbird 1 Comment
Wassailing the Trees and 2 types of Toasts

Wassailing the Trees and 2 types of Toasts

Garden, Learning, Nature Art, Play, Recipes, Twelfth Night
For years we have wassailed our fruit trees on the Twelfth Night to ensure a bountiful fruit harvest, because who doesn't want a bountiful fruit harvest, right? My kids were little and I never really went into too much depth though... until this year when I went down a rabbit hole and became obsessed with wassail toast. More on that later. For years we stuck a cinnamon stick in a cup of apple juice and sang songs about wassailing or fruit and it was a good time. Actually only my 7 year old ever remembers the words to "Here we come a Wassailing" so he's generally in charge lol. They also sometimes make up songs about specific fruit trees in our yard. It's fun and you should try it! As…
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03Jan 2023 by catbird 2 Comments
The Twelfth Night

The Twelfth Night

Craft Project, Play, Twelfth Night
I am never quite set on what to call this holiday– January 6th. Its Epiphany, Twelfth Night, Three Kings Day, Befana. Most of them are Christian in origin having something to do with the three wise men arriving at the manger with gifts. In fact, in 567 the Council of Tours proclaimed that the entire period between Christmas and Epiphany should be considered the twelve days of Christmas replacing an ancient celebration that the church deemed “too rowdy.” Modern scholars have suggested that it was instead to solve "administrative problems for the Roman Empire as it tried to coordinate the solar Julian calendar with the lunar calendars of its provinces in the east." And in fact, those ancient celebrations all revolved around that same discrepancy between the lunar and solar…
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02Jan 2023 by catbird 1 Comment
Dried Orange Garland Tea

Dried Orange Garland Tea

Recipes, Twelfth Night
It is traditional at Twelfth Night celebration to eat any edible holiday decorations- you can imagine that long ago when citrus (and food in general) was more rare that eating these expensive items was just common sense in addition to bringing a close to the holiday season. This is also the date many feel that holiday decoration in general should come down. For us, that often means that I let the kids try to eat their fossilized gingerbread houses (which I think is gross, but they love) but this year I wanted to do something a little more interesting. When I made my citrus garland tutorial I was very intentional in including that after use as decorations, the slices could be made into tea. I decided that using dried orange…
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