That Back to School Feeling

The boys have returned to school and Preschool today.  In the two child free hours I get, I was planning to take down the decdorations that are outside, but this is what the conservatory looked like at lunchtime today!!

I also failed to get to the bank to get the cash for MaxiMads dinner money and as he went to school in his shoes he wasn't allowed to play out in the snow - hmm I think that I kind of failed at being a great mummy this morning!

I was going to bring the Bin in once I got the boys home from school and bunkered down for the evening, but this is what it looks like outside.  So it can wait for MadDad coming home from work.

Yep our road is lethal, the frost has started already and we are forecast snow tonight and heavy snow on Wednesday.   MadDad got new tyres for his car today and will be taking mine tomorrow for new ones.  An expensive start to the month, but needs must!

I have a sausage casserole bubbling away, candles are lit and the house is all warm and cosy.  I have got the boys wellies, waterproof trousers and snow mittens (Tchibo 2 years ago) ready for the morning.  I will do better.  I will also get MadDad to pop to a cash point on his way home or write a cheque for the months school dinners!

Now where did I put MaxiMads homework book.......

Reindeer Food, Hearts and Friends

I am a lucky lady you know.  I have made some wonderful friends over the internet.  I am blessed to have them and wanted to say thank you for all their support during this year.

So, we make reindeer food as part of our annual christmas traditions, therefore, I made a little extra and have packaged it off to them and their little ones as a gesture of my feelings for them.

Reindeer food

I haven't re-invented the wheel here, we basically use oats and glitter or coloured sugar.

It is dead easy to colour sugar, pop it in a plastic bag, add food colour and shake!!  We use this as we live in a rural area, but have used glitter too.

Simply mix with oats and pop in a bag and add printable label.  I had wrote the labels last year, but Amy at The Idea Room has ones you can print here 

Now things might have been quiet on the craft and sewing front on the blog, but that is due to the fact I have been busy in real life.  I have been making red hearts.

And Mother of peal button heart decorations for the big people.

 

 

 

And lots and lots of personalised stockings and zip bags for some wonderful little people!

It feels brilliant to make things myself, they are made full of love and from things in my stash, so I have managed to do this and not break the bank.  So Merry Christmas Friends and thank you for being there for me this year.

Family Treasures Old and New

I have been reminded this weekend of why I make thing with the boys and for the boys.

We have been decorating gingerbread house's at my mums with my niece and we put up the snowmen decorations I made when I was 8 so they are 28 years old and the minimads loved them.

I have to say the houses which we from Ikea were a nightmare to fix together and eventually both collaspsed under the weight of three children and excess sweets I fear.

But as you can see they had a fantastic time making them.

We also dropped off the plate I had decorated for my Neice and the boys for their treats for Santa.

I had a great time decorating them with paint that we already had and the plates were 90p each from Morrisons.  They only took about 20 minutes each and are now dishwasher safe.

I hope that these become the fur snowmen of the future.

We did have an eventful drive home though.  It started snowing again when the children were having their dinner and we set off as soon as they had finished.  What should have been a 20 minute trip home, took us three hours.

We woke to a wonderful winter wonderland this morning.

Bloggy Love

I decided to take part in the Christmas Ornament swap this year.  I already had the materials to make my ornament, so it would only be the postage costs.

 

 

 

My Ornaments received from my partner at ooodlesofnoodles.blogspot.com are fabtastic and look great on the tree,  I love them.

I also received a lovely Circle of friends award from Penny at Pennys Hen House.  This means an awful lot to me, in fact I cried.

Now I have to tell you 5 things I like to do:

Smell my children

Walk by the sea, even in the winter

Sewing

Having my hair washed at the hairdressers (Roll on Tuesday)!!

Drinking tea

I have to pass this on to 5 people

Sandy at Baby Baby, I think we are living paralle lives!!

Aby at Mutterings from the moor, a wonderful, caring and just fab lady

Suzie at itch2stitch, she has been through so much and is a tower of stregth to me

Stephanie at Bah! to Cancer, She has the most wonderful attitude and I think I am a little bit in love with her!!!

I would also pass it back to Penny, as she has been supporting me from the start!

A Pause in Advent

Well my pause for Advent this week has to be on the whole Nativity play in primary schools.

MaxiMad is in Reception and his play Woops a Daisy Angel tool place on Wednesday and you can read all about it here.
MiniMad is in Preschool (nursery), he is in the afternoon group, which are the youngest children in the school.  We went to his production on Friday afternoon and it was more than a joy to behold.  Unlike Maxi, he had been practicing his songs aloud for about 2 weeks and they were along a pretty traditional line, away in a manger, jingle bells etc.

The most wonderful thing was that all the children were pretty well behaved and it was so fun watching them wave to their family in the crowds and on more than one occasion communicate with them and ask if they were enjoying it.

I am ever so grateful that the boys go to a school, which hasn't killed off the traditional nativity for a non-denominational holiday concert and that the nativity forms the central part of the story.

Both boys are enjoying learning about Baby Jesus, the shepherds and the wise men and even the Christmas Star.

I dont quite know why, but the nativity has always held a special place in my heart, possibly due to the fact that every year in my primary school our concerts were held in the church for our parents to visit and it was one of the main things that when I was terribly unwell I clung too.  In fact MadDad reminded me that I was shouting at the doctors that I would come back and haunt them if I died and didn't get to see MiniMads first nativity.

I am finding it such a joy to sit and talk about all of this with the boys at Dinner time each day, it has opened such a line of questioning, it is with such innocence and humor that they thing about things.

Some of the comments we have had this week:

Jesus only wears pants and and swish cloth in his manger - Mini

Isn't Jesus lucky he had two dads, Joseph and God - Maxi

One of the wise men was called Frank Sence - Mini

How did the camels make a clip clop sound if they were stood on sand? - Maxi

Julias Cesar lived in Rome - Mini
Did Mary and Joseph have to go through Eygpt?

How great that they are thinking about it all and have not once asked about presents or advent chocolates.  

They have been keeping me busy baking, decorating and crafting though. 

Why my Christmas's will always be stuck in the 70's

When I was growing up Christmas was a magical time.  It usually started after my Birthday on December 20th when we would put up the tree and the decorations.  Now this was no mean feet as my parents lived in a Edwardian house with very high ceilings and we would string paper chains from each corner to the ceiling rose in the centre of the room.

The tree would also be placed on a table in the bay window and would be about 8 foot tall. My Granddad, who lived with us would always take me and my little brother out for a couple of hours Christmas shopping whilst my mum and dad finished all the decorating and then we would come home to snowballs and Babysham (although I am sure ours was non-alcoholic)

Like lots of other children of the 70's, I used to leave Father Christmas a mince pie and a drink of Whiskey and lie awake listening out for those jingling bells that meant he was on his way. 

I dont know how they did it, but mum and dad managed to make Christmas morning really special, we always got something off our list, out mince pie was always half eaten and the Whiskey all gone. 

Christmas Day was always spent at home.  We always started with our stockings, which  were pillow cases really and would usually have chocolate coins and oranges in them, in addition to a new hair slide or bobble for me, then it was breakfast, before we moved on to the larger pile of presents.

And what of those memorable presents, well we have a Sindy House and Horse one year, (no Barbi for this girl, I was Sindy through and through) a Grifter bike in green, A petite typewriter, a Simon says, a Sorry game,  a Bontempi organ and a Girls World.  These were mostly pre-loved, but I didn't care.

My Dad and Granddad would always pop down the pub for a swift one before Christmas Dinner was served and this was the one day of the year we were allowed chocolate before dinner!!  We always watched top of the pops and always pulled their crackers in addition to our own and we always had new nightwear to go to bed in on Christmas Night,

Boxing Day was spent at my Aunty Christine's, (my mum's eldest sister), her brood and my maternal Granddad.  We all went to the local working mens club and played dominos.  I distinctly remembering drinking the dregs out of peoples glasses off all the tables one year!!

We would then all pile back for the most wonderful meal of cornbeef  and potato pie and propper chips.  The children all ate in the sitting room, whilst the adults all ate in the dinning room.  We would then all retire round the coal fire (which would be stacked with sea coal cones) and eat the best ever ginger parkin in the world and play parlour games.  It was always my favorite time.  

I loved my Aunty, granddads and cousins more than anything in the world.  My Mum and Dad would always get my Maternal Granddad a boy of chocolate cigarettes and cigars and pipes and my mum would open them and pop in £20 notes.  This was how they got him to accept anything off the family.  He always refused presents, so all his children clubbed together and this became his pin money over the year.

My Aunt was a super crocheter and we always ended up going home asleep in the car wrapped in one of her blankets, with my paternal granddad driving, as he will not have drink that day.  She used to make those toilet dollys and soap swans for months for everyone for Christmas.

I am sat in tears as I write this as my Aunt died as I hit my teens for the dreaded curse of cancer which effects my maternal line so hard.  With her died a part of my mother and all the family really.  She was the eldest, the glue that held them all together.  The one that refereed her siblings arguments and put everything in to perspective.

So for me my Christmas will always be stuck in the 1970's and you know what it isnt a bad place for it to be and the more I thing about it, it is where I want my boys Christmas to be too.

This started out as a post about prompt 3 in Sleep is for the weak writing workshop “Have you ever had an epiphany, when you realized that something you’d long believed wasn’t really true?”, but transformed in to something else!!!

Decorating on a Budget

I'm just a boy who helps around

The workshop and I can be found

Sawing for Joseph or shaping wood

Helping a master who's kind and good

And now I'm here to wave goodbye

To watch them go and know that I

Am trusted to finish the table and stools

And take proper care of the carpenters tools

I have had a lot of of wonderful compliments on the Christmas Decorations here at TheMadHouse, so here are some tips for decorating on a budget.

MadDad and I have been lucky enough to build up our collection since we were married nearly 14 years ago.  We decided pretty immediately that we wanted a traditional look and would go down the mainly red, green and gold colour scheme and have stuck to it.  That is the key for me.  We have a small tree in the dinning room which the children call their tree and we put all their decorations on or around it.  They like it better this was.  The tree was our first ever tree from Agros 12 years ago in the sale!

Great places for shopping for decorations:

Ikea

Great value, Scandinavian style and a little bit different.  This year I have bought a few garlands to drape over the twig lights, they are wired and only 99p each.  They look so much better in real life than the photographs.

 

Straw decorations  - I strung some that we purchased a couple of years ago on cotton and hung from the curtain rail.

Ikea also do great candle-bridges which are super for adding atmosphere to a room.

John Lewis

We have bought quite a lot of items from John Lewis, they tend to reduce items before Christmas. 

These santa dolls are reduced to £2.85 

Poundland 

 

You have to look, but they often have great basics such a baubles for a pound.  I fill up vases with them, to make our standard decorations look even better.  They also have gold and silver spray that you can use to decorate pine cones etc with.

Friends and Family

Often parents and grandparents have lots and lots of decorations, many more than they use, why not ask if you can look through the boxes that they havnt used this year.

This Father Christmas came from my mum, she hadn't used it for years as it was part of a double set and it is older than me!!

Home Made

The older I get, the more sentimental I get nad I love to see the children make their own decorations, but homemade decorations do not always have to look childish.

I made our advent stockings and our personalized stocking too.

Charity Shops

I always keep an eye out on the charity shops on the lead up to Christmas as they often get some super retro decorations in.

Many, many places know down the cost of their decorations after Christmas, that is how we got our tree (Homebase for £10 in the sale 5 years ago).  So it pays to scope out and look for inspiration in these places sometimes and add them on your January hit list.  Marks and Spencer have some lovely decorations in this year, so if cash allows I will be taking a look in January.

So my basic tips are:

Still to a simple colour scheme year on year (do not follow trends)
Buy in the Sales
Ask family and freinds if they have any spare decorations they do not want
Try the supermarket for basics
Never throw any of it away
Always store it correctly in the loft or garage
Make your own - popcorn on bakers string looks fantastic
Look for pieces that will last

Lastly do not try and do it all at once or it will look overly forced.  Our decorations grow with us each year, we have ones we have purchased on our holidays to Boston, South Africa, Paris and Amsterdam.  My mum even brought us Disney ones back from her trip to the US last year.  Putting the tree up is as much fun for me reminicing about where, who and what ornemants we bought, as it is talking to the boys about them.  The tree holds a lot of precious memories, like the boys first baubles

 

Pine cone door decoration

Mary I've packed the oil

And I've packed the grain,

The water is ready

Now listen again -

Here are the blankets and covers

And your mattress there,

So please, my sweet friend,

Keep warm and take care

Today I have a very easy Pine Cone decoration, which I totally pinched from Sweet Paul.

It is very easy for an older child to do on their own, MaxiMad and I did this together.  We also made one for my mum with red ribbon and golden sprayed cones, but forgot to take any photo's of it before we gave it to her yesterday.

I couldn't find my glue gun (my mother had it), so used Bostik All Purpose Glue to stick the end of the lengths of ribbon to pine cones. 

I am starting to really enter in to the advent spirit and we are all enjoying our time together with a task each day.  Tonight we are off to "Carols on the Green" in the pouring rain, but I have waterproofs out for the boys so at least they will remain dry.

Oh and the marble run has gone back to Father Christmas (grandma's house), where MaxiMad will get it on Boxing day as a thank you for checking it worked OK for Father Christmas!