Make-it Night

My favorite night of Hanukkah at our house is the self-instituted make-it night, where the gifts we give are the gifts we make. I LOVE crafts. I'm just not that good at making them, being too impatient for some of the finer details. Fortunately, I've never let that stop me.

Here are the things I made the kids this year:

Hopefully you can recognize these guys without a label. My kids, at least, knew who they were!!


This is a skirt made from fabric created by the amazing Heather Ross. I used this free Lazy Days Skirt Pattern, which allows even people like me to look as if they know what they're doing.

Movie toys

Who needs Happy Meal toys? We saw Wall-E this week and the kids came up with these little dudes the next day. Wall-E stands on two toilet paper rolls. He opens up so you can put trash inside him. The back is an orange crate. Eva is made out of paper and an old lemonade mix container. She has a flashlight arm "for blasting." I can't find the cockroach -- I think he's lost somewhere in my daughter's bed -- but he's made out of a film canister. I'll post him when I find him.

5 minute moomin

Okay, these actually took more than 5 minutes to make, but they didn't take TOO long so I figured I'd share. Introducing the sock Moomins, as visualized by my own Moomin fans.



The inspiration:
These past few weeks, Washington's embassies have been host to the Kids Euro Festival. This is the second year they've held it. Last year we were too out of it to notice. This year we noticed late and by the time we did, we were too ensconced in soccer games to make it to most of the free (yes! free!) performances. BUT we made it to one, at the Finnish embassy, featuring "a musical landscape" inspired by Tove Jansson's Moomintroll Books. I loved these books as a kid, and when I read them to my kids last year, they loved them, too. There is something a little other worldly about them (duh: they're about MOOMINS), and magical, and sweet, and strange.

The Moomins look a little like hippos, except smaller. (Their ears are actually a little rounder than these, but my kids thought triangles would work best so that's what they cut out.) At the Finnish Embassy, the Moomins weren't small. They were mascot size. (Which sort of makes sense because in Finland, the Moomins seem to be as prevalent as Mickey Mouse. There's even a Moomin World.) In the U.S., the Moomins are ambassadors.

The event featured Snufkin, Moomintroll, Little My, and Sniff, dancing and singing. Snufkin, of course, was the host. He played a saw. And the whole performance was a little magical. And strange. It kind of reminded me of the first time I saw The Teletubbies (which means I did think once or twice: What were they smoking? But in a sweet, affectionate way.) The event was definitely geared for the preschool age, though the books are for older kids. Still, the other-worldliness of it made it tolerable for my guys, as did the freebies: Ginger cookies shaped like Moomintroll and Snufkin! Slap bracelets! Little pins in the shape of Moomintroll! The space was great, the architecture of the building was very cool, and what's not to love about a Finnish guy in a green hat playing a saw?

Went home from the event and immediately my kids wanted to make Moomins out of socks (while my husband wanted to book us on the next plane to Finland.) Buoyed by our recent success with Sock Hedwig, we put together our Sock Moomins fairly quickly, though I'm calling what we came up with a prototype because they can definitely be improved (i.e. next time we need to use NEW socks instead of socks that are a little brown at the heal! Next time we should go with black felt and white felt for the eyes instead of a magic marker.) But once again, we're all about immediate gratification here. An hour or so later we had two Moomins, which have been a hit, even if Moominmama did have to borrow Polly Pocket's purse.

Oh, and I just found a picture I loaded from last winter, when we made Moomins out of Sculpey. They're a bit battered here -- the ears being the most breakable. We built them a little house out of a yogurt container. And blueberry pancakes on plates. Hours of entertainment!


And we're definitely putting the festival on our calendar for next year. I was especially interested in some of the Romanian magic acts, but there were too many time conflicts. I think with better planning we can get more out of it.

Five-minute Hedwig

My kids are all about immediate gratification. So when my son put on his Harry Potter robe last week in preparation for Halloween, he asked, right away, for a Hedwig.
"I didn't buy a Hedwig," I told him.
"Could we make one?"
"Sure," I said. "But it would take a while."
"We could make one now," he said. "We could use one of Daddy's socks, put some stuffing in it, then I could use marker for eyes, you could sew felt on for wings."
He paused.
"And talons."
I had all of the stuff he mentioned. He had the pattern in his head, so we tried it. In FIVE MINUTES we had Hedwig.
Not perfect, perhaps, and I may make a fluffier owl for Halloween (I'm not an expert sewer, but I'm competitive enough to want my kid to have more than a sock on his shoulder, especially if my friend Vicki goes trick-or-treating with us this year.) On the other hand, he's happy with it. And we have another use for mismatched socks.

giving and getting

As a parent, it can be tricky negotiating the holiday season. Part of me wants to spoil my kids rotten and give them everything they want, including the $75 Screamin' Serpent Roller Coaster (which, thank goodness, we found at a yard sale for $15.) Part of me wants to just go all Little House on the Prairie on them, and offer up an orange and a pair of mittens and maybe some molasses candy. I'll expect nothing but joy and thanks, of course.

I probably end up do more spoiling (sorry Pa) but I try to temper it some. One thing we do is divide the eight nights of Chanukah into different categories.
There's pajama night, for instance, where each kid gets pjs, which they need anyway. There's music night, where they get something music related. There's giving night, where we do something for other people outside of our family. There's Make-It night, where you have to make something for each other. And then there's Sock Night.

When I was growing up, we didn't have the money to be spoiled rotten. On Chanukah, friends thought I was lucky because I got eight presents. What they didn't know was that in my family and almost every other Jewish family that I knew, seven of those presents ended up being pairs of socks. (Well, mittens, too, but the socks really stand out.) As we grew older, it became a family joke. We still exchange socks, the flashier the better. But the first year my son opened up a pair of socks from his grandmother, he wasn't that psyched. Then I got smart and instituted Sock Night where that's all they get. My so knows exactly to expect. No looking at the package and imagining a rocket ship, only to find a pair of socks. This year I let him pick which night was which. He chose Sock Night as night no. 2. I don't know if he did that because he wanted Sock Night or because he just wanted to get it over with. Either way, he doesn't complain about anymore.

Last year at our preschool we started a sock drive for the homeless (working slogan: This year, EVERYBODY gets socks for Chanukah.) The preschool came through again this year, and on Monday we dropped 200 pairs of socks off at the Arlington-Alexandria Homeless Coalition. My daughter came with me to do the drop off. Here's hoping something sinks in.

I'm enclosing a picture of the puppet I made for Make-It Night.
My friend Annie does some craft blogging (though she's recently switched to book blogging with her kids.) Still, she inspired me to throw some crafting stuff here, too, as that's what I'd be doing with my spare time IF I HAD ANY SPARE TIME. Which I don't. Aside from the time I spend writing this stuff. Ahem. Anyway, did I mention that our family has a slight Muppet infatuation??? I think Jim Henson did some of his best work with pingpong balls.