Martinmas Celebration

on Tuesday we celebrated Martinmas with a lantern walk at a friends house. I co-hosted the event with her and did the puppet show while my friend did everything else! It was a nice evening. The kids made lanterns, played, had a sit down snack and a puppet show followed by a lantern walk around the neighborhood. It was such a nice low key festival. I am glad that we were able to go since tonight is the lantern walk at the Waldorf school and I made the decision not to drive an hour not knowing if they were having it or not because of the rain. We went last year and it was lovely. I do enjoy the festivals associated with Waldorf , they are so simple and meaningful!


After our lantern walk at our friends house, Ryan and I came home and he wanted to have a family lantern walk. So we turned off all the lights and walked around the house leading Ryan upstairs to bed. We read the lantern story from our Tiptoes book and said goodnight by lantern light!

The lanterns above are all the lanterns we have made over the past 4 Martinmas celebrations. THe very first one was when Ryan was 2 - that would be the biggest one with the stars. The most recent is the blue jar lantern in the middle.


Here is our St Martin puppet I made for the puppet show. He is rather cute and his cape is in 2 peices so that I was able to show how Martin tore his cape in 2 and gave half to the poor beggar man. Now he sits on our Nature table in a place of honor.


Continuing the Martinmas celebration we had our playgroup on Thursday, however is was very low key because I had to leave early for a midwife apt. I decided to make window stars. I figured everyone coming has made many lanterns and we needed to do something different. The stars are great though, they look so beautiful in the window , esp lately with our dreary rainy days.
I also ended up doing a simple puppet show using the story of St Martin from the Tiptoes festival book. The kids seemed to enjoy it. My friend Elieen has more pictures of our day: http://eileensplace.blogspot.com



Then the kids had a good time playing in the playroom. Ryan said they were doing construction. Usually that means a lot of things get moved around, but it was not too bad this time.