Celebrating Midsummer

Cling, ding ,ding

The summer bells now ring:

There’s laughter on the hills,

The daisies show their frills.

Cling, ding, ding

Be welcome Summer King!

Cling, ding, ding

The summer bells now ring:

The shepherds pipe all day,

The lambkins frisk and play.

Cling, ding, ding

Be Welcome Summer King!

~Wynstones' Summer

W and I have been joyously singing this song all day.  He especially loves the "Cling Ding Ding" lines.   In our family Midsummer/St. John's Day is one of our happiest and most loved celebrations of the year.  W and I have been preparing for this celebration for the past week.  It has been a lot of fun since he was really able to assist with many of the preparations this time.

W helps his mama with the Midsummer decorations.

He is especially proud of these suns, which I cut from some watercolor paintings that W did this week. I oiled the paper to make it translucent with the intent of taping them up to our balcony door.   unfortunately the oil caused them to slip right off of the tape so we decided to scatter them on our table instead.  W likes to point to them and tell me that he made them and that they are beautiful.  They were inspired by this post from Seeds from The Yew Tree.

I also worked on several Window Stars especially for Midsummer in the colors of the sun.  They turned out so beautifully and I love having them hanging on the balcony door, though we may need to edit out the collection a bit as it's getting rather crowded, but they do really brighten up the room when the sun shines through them.  We are very fond of our stars and they have gone a long way towards making this new apartment feel like home.

I love this dragonfly!  Actually I love dragonflies in general and one made from window star folds is just so much fun.  Directions can be found here for the dragonfly, butterflies and flowers.

Other paper decorations included making more suns for the china cabinet and the yellow paper spirals we hung from the dining room chandelier.  Both of these were inspired by All Year Round which remains my go-to book for most of our festivals.  I especially love the explanations and background information this book gives on the festivals and their origins.

My other crafting projects for the day included making floating beeswax candles (which I wrote about last year) and a sand candle.  W supervised me in making these projects but I wouldn't let him too close to the  hot beeswax.  I think both of these are destined to become part of our family midsummer traditions.  W did help make the little dish that holds the sand candle from sand clay that we made together.  We had a lot of fun with it, but he kept trying to eat the clay...silly boy.  He never tries to eat regular play dough, so I'm not sure why he thought the sand clay was edible.

W and I also put together our summer nature table and W has been thoroughly enjoying exploring the various elements of it over and over.  I love how things on our nature table spark his curiosity and  imagination and are the jumping off point for many of the discussions during any given day.

Of course food is always an important part of our family festival, so W and I have been cooking too.  We made homemade honey butter and mixed in some basil from our garden.  It is so incredibly delicious.  We ate it on homemade bread and on corn on the cob and all just loved it!

For our bread, again, inspired by Seeds From The Yew Tree, I attempted to make a  beehive out of bread.  It ended up looking more like a coiled blob, but it is some of the best tasting bread I've made in a while, so I'm not going to complain.  Daddy was as always in charge of the grill which also served as our big fire element since we can't really have a bonfire in our apartment complex.  He grilled delicious burgers and some healthy-ish nitrate-free hotdogs.

While he was grilling W played with some neighborhood kids and I was able to visit with one of the moms who happens to be from one of the places I used to live a while back.

I didn't manage to get the giant bubbles together for this year so W and his new friend played with some bubble wands though most of the bubble solution ended up on the ground...but that's to be expected with toddlers.  W also really enjoyed trying to catch the bubbles I made with mine.

Then we came inside to eat, rounding out our feast with fresh green beans, watermelon and basil lemonade.

For dessert we had the same Summer Berries Bread Pudding I made last year (link to post with recipe).  It was as delicious as I remembered from last year.

W was especially fond of it and really wanted seconds.  Then again, this boy has never met a berry he didn't like and this has fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries in it.

W also celebrated Midsummer by leaving some dried wild blueberries in these little tea cups for the fairies, who should leave him something in return tomorrow morning.  He is really looking forward to seeing what they bring.

I also wanted to mention one other source of information that I have drawn heavily from this year for our Midsummer/St. John's Day celebration.  This post from Christine Natale has so much wonderful information about the day.  She even convinced me to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream on Netflix yesterday while W napped.  I ended up with this 1968 version instead of the ones she recommends since it was the only one available to stream.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it is quite obviously a very late 1960's production....oh the strange juxtaposition of the story, scenery and costumes! All the women except for Judi Dench are wearing these little mini dresses and knee high boots and the men's costumes are almost out of a period piece! Ha Ha!

Anyways, back to  Christine Natale's post.  I also really liked her explanation of the significance of St. John's Day coming six months before Christmas and preparing the way for Christ as well as her discussion of balance.  I definitely find that I am needing a bit more balance in my days right now and it is something I will be working on in the coming days as we look towards fall, winter and Christmas.  This has all greatly enriched my appreciation of Midsummer and made it more meaningful on a very profound and personal level.  It is not an aspect of the festival that I bring directly to W, but I know he benefits from my working on it myself.

Wishing you all the happiest of Midsummers!

Lady Zinnia Under The Old Oak Tree

We have a true fondness for zinnias at our house.  They are one of my favorite flowers to grow in my container gardens.  I love their bright flowers and the depths and range of colors found in their petals.  Last midsummer we floated zinnia blossoms along with the rose petals and candles in our centerpiece.

It is with great pleasure that I introduce Lady Zinnia, our newest addition Under The Old Oak Tree.  I hope she will bring great pleasure to those she meets.

Yarn Along

I am continue to participate in Small Things' Yarn Along this week.  

I've done some more work on my shawl, but the stockinette portion is taking a while, and I needed some knitting variety, so I have cast on this scarf.  You may remember I made about five of these last Christmas as gifts for the women in my family.  They are a great quick knit and I had intended to make one  for me and never got around to it, so here we go.  I've made a few small changes to the pattern for interest.  I'm using some purple Patons Wool yarn that I found left over in my stash.

This week I have finished up Children at Play.  I found that I really enjoyed it and that it is having quite an impact already on how I view W's play and toys and reinforces what we are choosing for him in terms of education.

I also have been looking at the verses, songs and stories in Wynstones Press's

Summer: A Collection of Poems, Songs and Stories for Young Children, as we look forward to summer and our Midsummer/ St. John's Day celebration.

This week I found myself revisiting Raising a Son which I have not looked at since W was an infant.  As part of my quest to be a more mindful parent, I felt that I wanted to delve into this again.

For fun I picked up The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte  from the library. I read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre a few weeks ago in preparation for listening to the Diane Rehm Show's program on that book.  One of her guests was the other of this novel, Syrie James.  I loved Jane Eyre and decided to read a novel about the author as well. 

W also made a selection for this week's Yarn Along.  A friend recently recommended Farmer Brown Shear His Sheep: A Yarn About Wool so we picked it up from the library.  The illustrations are very cartoonish for my taste, but the story is told through a wonderful, humorous rhyme and W and I love that it covers all the steps in making a sweater from shearing the sheep to knitting.  It is definitely a fun read, especially for two sheep and wool lovers like W and myself.

Happy Midsummer!

We had a truly lovely Midsummer celebration this past week.  I love the Waldorf festivals so much!  I love how they allow us to celebrate the season and challenge me to do different crafts and handwork that are out of my usual routine.  I love how they have already set a rhythm to our year.  Our family chose to celebrate Midsummer on June 24th incorporating St. John the Baptist's feast day into our celebration as well.

In preparation, I started needle felting some little bees a few weeks ago to hang on on our nature table tree.  I made four of them so far and they are very cute.  W and I colored some wood cutouts from the craft store with our beeswax crayons and hung them on the tree too. W especially likes the frog, the turtle and the dragonflies!  He has already pulled down the nature table tree a couple of times trying to get to them.  It's quite a mess and it really upsets him when it falls, but I'm glad he likes it.  W and I also made some bright yellow suns out of pearly soda clay which is really neat fun stuff.  We rolled it out and then cut the suns out with a cookie cutter and let them dry.  I poked little holes in the top with a large needle so that we could hang them on the tree too.  We also made paper stars in shades of red orange and yellow, including my first 16 point star which is just beautiful when the sun shines through.

  On the morning of midsummer I also cut out paper suns and taped them to our china cabinet doors.  They really helped make things festive!

We used the other items to help decorate the nature table and also brought out all of our shells and other summer items to reflect the season.

My other Midsummer handwork was to make floating beeswax candles from these directions.  I made a sun and a duck to float in our table centerpiece. I did have some difficulty unmolding the sun, but I was eventually able to.   While I had the wax melted  I also  made some tea lights and refilled/re-wicked our meal candle that we made at Candlemas.  I love candle-making and love using our homemade candles even more!

For our centerpiece, I used my punch bowl, placing various seashells in the bottom, then filling it with water.  On top of the water I floated my two candles, rose petals, a few sunflower petals, a zinnia blossom, I had accidentally plucked from my plant and some lavender blossoms. It was so pretty.  Behind this I placed a pitcher of sunflowers and roses.  Underneath, I placed more of the soda clay stars and set out W's tea set for a fairy tea party.

For food, Daddy grilled chicken burgers  and hot dogs and we had  fresh green beans, a salad with tomatoes from our garden and potato salad.  We also had my basil/pineapple sage lemonade to drink.  A fairly simple seasonal menu that was very yummy!

The real treat was the summer berries pudding that W and I made.  It was so fun to have him help me with this and he loved it!  We started working from the recipe in All Year Round but altered it a good bit for our family's produce availability, tastes and dietary needs.  This is our recipe (one we will make often, I have a feeling).

Summer Berries Bread Pudding

1 loaf of Italian bread, sliced, crusts trimmed off but reserved.
fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries (1-2 pints each)
1 can of light coconut milk
1/4 cup local honey

Line the bottom of a dish with slices of bread, then top with the fresh raspberries, a second layer of bread, the blueberries, more bread, the blackberries, more bread, then sliced strawberries. and more bread (I ended up using the crusts when I ran out of  the bread slices).

Mis the coconut milk and honey and pour over the bread and fruit evenly (you may not need all of the milk and be careful not to overflow your dish like I did-what a mess!) Place a plate on top of this and weight it down in the refrigerator (I use a large jar filled with basil and pineapple sage lemonade for this).

I tried unmolding this, but it started to fall apart so I turned it back into it's dish and we dipped it out.  It was really really good and we all love it!  We have also been eating the leftovers with breakfast which has been lovely.

We also tried to make giant bubbles like these from Childhood Magic but it was getting late for W and it had started to sprinkle so we came back inside.  W and I did manage to do this in the days leading up to Midsummer though and he really enjoyed them.

For W we recited the verse shown here on Ancient Hearth's blog.  We then put some "fairy food" otherwise known as raisins in W's tea set cups and told him the fairies might leave him something there in the morning.  The kind and generous fairies left him some little red gems that he has been enjoying since he found them the following morning.

For the adults, we read  Luke 3:1- 18 and reflected on how we can prepare ourselves for relationship with God.  Daddy then had to play a couple songs from Godspell because it reminded him of it and the whole family sang and dance along...a fun impromptu way to our end our evening!