In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!

I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:

My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!

The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--

--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):

My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:

Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!

Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...

Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Time Fillers That Aren't Busy Work (Even for High Schoolers!)

My high schooler would be horrified to know this, but I do sometimes assign her work that's more of a time-filler than it is a substantive assignment.

Sometimes, it's because she has a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to her stress.

Sometimes, it's because *I* have a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to *my* stress.

Sometimes we've finished up a big unit of study but it's not the perfect time to start the next one, or one of us isn't feeling 100%, or we've got an appointment or some other thing that would interrupt her flow, but I still want her learning that day.

Essentially, time fillers work well for all those times and gaps when you want your student doing something educational, but you also want it to be low-stakes for both of you. The student is using her mind but not wracking her brain, and YOU don't have to review, edit, correct, or evaluate!

Here's some of my favorites from my collection of high school-level time fillers that are educational but low-stakes:

Board Games

Sometimes teenagers just need a break from book work and screen work. Reading textbooks and solving problems and filling in answers is also just one limited, specific type of learning, so I don't like that to be all my high schooler does for school all day. 

We don't have a formal logic study currently, but logical thinking is an extremely beneficial skill, so I encourage a lot of logic games that I file as math enrichment. We play word games, association games, and creativity games for English credit, and historical games like Senet, Mancala, and Go for history/geography credit. Occasionally, I'll even find a game that we can play in my high schooler's target language.

Here are some of my favorites:

We've got some made-up games that we can play anywhere, as well, most notably the Wikipedia Game and Dictionary Definitions, and once in a blue moon I'll go to the trouble of downloading and printing an online-sourced game like Phylo, especially if it fits into a niche in a subject that we're studying. 

Documentaries

I already see the public library as my personal streaming service, so it doesn't feel like a big deal for me to do a quick catalog search whenever I'm planning the next few weeks' studies and just go ahead and request any documentaries that are on-topic and look interesting.

Documentaries about a topic of study build depth and context, and now that we're all such ipad babies, focusing on a piece of content for a whopping one hour really is something that we need to do every so often to stay in practice!

My immediate go-tos for documentaries are anything PBS, National Geographic, or BBC. Independent films and documentaries produced by news publications are also good, but I usually avoid anything else you might find on cable (TLC is most definitely NOT!) as being less in-depth than I want for a high schooler. The teenager and I are currently in the middle of a two-part PBS special on uranium, which I'm counting as enrichment for her Honors Chemistry study, but here are some other documentaries we've watched for high school:

Although they aren't quite documentaries, there are also a ton of lectures, presentations, and streams available on YouTube. Q&A sessions give me secondhand cringe, so we don't watch that part, meaning that the actual run-time is shorter than listed. This is also a good place to find performances that enhance liberal arts or language studies; my homeschoolers and I have watched lots of plays on YouTube, and lots of TV shows performed in whatever target language they're studying at that time:

Podcasts

We listen to a lot of audiobooks for the teenager's English credits, mostly while she works on her studio art and I do a handicraft and we chat. I don't want to give up that precious stitch-and-bitch time even when we're not burning through a 14-hour tome, though, so in between books I'll often fill in that space with a podcast. 

You can usually find a dozen different podcast episodes on any topic, so it's not hard to find something that fits into the teenager's current studies, but vetting new ones to see if they're good or if they're trash can take some time. We've also got favorite podcasts that are educational without necessarily being on-topic; here are a few:

 

Puzzles and Solitaire Games

We loooove our puzzles, with my teenager spending as much time working sudokus as my partner and I spend working crossword puzzles. Just in the last year or so the teenager seems to have mostly grown out of (or just mostly completed!) all of our in-house hands-on logic puzzles, but here are some of the favorites that she particularly enjoyed from childhood through the first couple of years of high school:

These days, if I want to assign her a short time-filler puzzle that's something fun, I'll have her do the daily Wordle, Murdle, or Set online. All three update daily, so there's always a new puzzle!

Process-Oriented Projects

I think that sensorial knowledge is still important to continue building, even into these older kid years. It's also important to continue building one's creativity and to remain comfortable with play, experimentation, and the concept of doing something simply to experience the process. 

To encourage my teenager to stay creative and experimental, I'll sometimes surprise her with an assignment like finding a new cookie recipe to bake, or creating a sticker design based on something we've been studying, or flipping through a stack of books I got from the library with her in mind, etc. Basically, I just want to stretch her out of her comfort zone of what she normally likes to bake or draw or read. Or maybe I'm just craving cookies but don't want to make them for myself! 

The art/math combo is my favorite focal point for building sensorial knowledge and experimenting with process. Over her high school years, the teenager has been compiling a portfolio of geometric art, and adding to it is a great way to bake some low-stakes math enrichment into the school week. Making things like mandalas, polyominoes, and tesselations put sensorial math knowledge into use, and build on geometry process that she's learned. 

Also, I'm obsessed with the spirograph!

In the lead-up to a holiday, there are all kinds of sneakily educational, mathematically sophisticated holiday crafts to create. There's a lot of beautiful math involved in wire-wrapping beads to make stars, or folding precisely symmetrical paper ornaments, or stitching felt mandalas or snowflakes. 

When there's not a holiday on the horizon, sometimes we'll just do something random like check out an origami or paper airplane book, or buy ourselves a DIY kit and decide to learn how to crochet. I'm currently low-key obsessed with a friendship bracelet loom that I made out of corrugated cardboard, so there's a lot of weaving going on around here.

As we move into the Spring semester of the teenager's Senior year, I can't decide if we're going to be doing more of these types of assignments, or less. On the one hand, I'm not opposed to ending one's high school career with a whimper rather than a bang, so as the teenager starts to finish her last units of study one-by-one, I don't want to necessarily replace them with equal amounts of puzzles and documentaries. But on the other hand, I do think that most of us need a goodly amount of productive work most days, so I definitely don't want a teenager to finish up all her learning and then sit around on my couch for several months actively not learning, ahem. 

Perhaps I'll see if there's a larger, more culminating-type project that the teenager would be interested in working on during those increasingly free school hours further into Spring? Or perhaps we'll get very, VERY good at crochet!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!