Planning For Winter Solstice

Here at the Sprenke/Bradberry house we celebrate the winter solstice and the return of the light. I've been making some plans to make this year's celebration extra fun.
The first thing I've been doing is planning for our seven days. We gives presents every night for the week leading up to solstice (for the kids). I have some fun gifts for the kids, including some beeswax rolled candle kits, gingerbread house kits and some kid sized baking equipment from this place: http://www.forsmallhands.com/store/ I'm also going to order a couple of winter themed books from http://www.barefootbooks.com/ and I bought a few presents today from our local toy store, Teaching Toys in Proctor. I love to support this wonderful store. Solomon really wants a real scooter this year, not his slow, three wheeled little boy one but a big boy one. So I got him a sparking razor scooter... I think he'll be happy. For Margo's big present I bought a small indoor trampoline. I'm not exactly sure where we are going to put this... which is why I was vying for a small outdoor with enclosure trampoline but Jon vetoed it, afraid a neighbor kid would get in our backyard when we aren't around and injure him/herself, which is actually pretty likely.

I'm making some plans for a lantern walk on Solstice eve. So far it looks like this: A few days before we are going to have a few friends over and make soy wax candles in little baby food jars and make some lanterns with balloons and tissue paper. You cut pieces of tissue paper and use white glue and water to paste it to a blown up balloon, let it dry and pop the balloon. It suppose to make a lovely lantern (although not very water proof, so we may need some back-up lanterns...) We just need to come up with some way to attach some way for the kids to hold onto it for their walk.

Before the walk I'm going to do a little puppet story for the kids using an Enki story about the Festival of Lights. It's a nice story and it incorporates Hanukkah, Kwanza, Christmas and Solstice. I think I'm going to get some different colored flannel fabric and sew some simple hand puppets and decorate them to cover the main characters. I need a couple of children and a mom, dad, grandpa people in different shades to cover different races. We'll then have the kids walk their lit lanterns around our neighborhood singing "This little light of mine" and return back here to warm up by the fire and have some soup for dinner. Followed by a little wine/beer drinking for the adults and some play time for the kids. This is my plan any way....