A Touchable Creche

Am spending today being festive. The online invitation service I used ate the Thanksgiving invitations instead of giving them out so we had an unexpectedly quiet and personal celebration here together. It was very peaceful and it was a very grown-up feeling to be serving a golden turkey to a table crowded with happy faces that I am mother to.

Today though, the house is warming up to the smell of the live fir we brought home. We've got a new spot for it this year, a little fresh thinking and furniture rearranging turned up a cozy new center of the room spot for it...directly across from the fireplace, nuzzled up the couch so we can read storybooks in the glow.

Yesterday the great decoration endeavor began. All the pumpkins went to the kitchen to be roasted, all the bittersweet went out the compost pile and the bronze ribbon was folded carefully and tucked into the "Autumn" shelf in our basement storeroom. There is a small congregation of red and green Rubbermaid tubs in the living room now and we've hauled all manner of glittering things out and tucked them here and there.

This year I set up our ceramic look-but-don't-touch creche on the top of our dining room bookcase to keep it farther from tempted fingers but in full view of everyone who wanted to look. Then we got the glue gun out, rooted through the toys and the fabric scraps and made a new, kid-friendly wooden creche for the old spot on the top of the cupboard in our entry hall. The boys had so much fun helping me make tiny little shepherd's staffs and special magi costumes and we used up a whole bunch of the sticks they love to stash making our little version of a stable.

 The whole kit and caboodle is basically a bunch of wooden peg dolls that we decorated and a cardboard box. We draped a gauzy curtain across the painting hanging behind it, dangled white twinkle lights inside and topped the whole thing with an extra tree-topper star we had sitting in the depths of one of the tubs. The boys were already up there playing several times, imagining angel songs and names for all the unknown characters. We added the wooden two farm animals Big Grandpa cut out of plywood one time when we were visiting up north and there's a little brown basket for a manger, waiting for the Christ Child. We're talking about what we'll make him out of on Christmas Eve. I may have a new tradition on my hands!

 

How to Blow Easter Eggs

Everyone I know hard boils their Easter eggs, but I like to blow them. To be perfectly plain we usually split our bounty in half and hard boil some and blow some because who doesn't like a good hardboiled egg, right? When I was a girl my mom taught us all how to blow an egg and it was part of our roster of special family traditions. Growing up I didn't know anyone who decorated hollow eggs and now, as an adult I have still, fantastically enough, never have knowingly met a single person who knew how to blow eggs much less anyone who really does it. Kind of fun to have a corner on something small.

I love the delicacy of the finished product:  such a feather light form of natural sculpture. I also love that you can keep the eggs out at room temperature. You can use them to decorate, keep them around for keepsakes or even give them as gifts because they are really art, not food; nature brought inside for appreciation....every bit as beautiful as driftwood sculpture or framed pressed flowers.

A finished, hollow egg.

I also love the niggly work of spearing the tiny blowing holes with our pearl-headed sewing pin (the pearl is key!). I think of how it must feel to be the tiny baby chick inside one of these shells, digging at it for your very life. Kind of a daunting task. It must be a major boost to see that first pin-prick of light shafting through the walls.

Here is how to blow your own hollow Easter eggs:

1. Stab a single tiny hole in one end of a raw egg.
2. Stab repeatedly at the other end in a circle about the size of the head of your pearl-headed pin.
3. Put the tiny hole to your lips and sealing tightly to the egg like a trumpet player, blow! (Be careful to hold your egg firmly but gently it is easy to get carried away with the exertion of blowing and crush the shell in your hands.)
4. The white will stream out first which is the hardest part to expell (Perservere! And occasionally shake the egg!) and then the yolk will come in golden rivulets, it's the easy part at the end.
5. Then rinse the eggs to remove all traces of yolk and white and leave to dry....then decorate away!

 

Ru was big enough to do one himself this year for the first time.

The "scrambled egg" leftovers we'll cook and eat on Easter morning.

Slightly over half a dozen, transluscent, hollow eggs. :)