Festival of Plants

It was a week that started with flooding* and ended with snow.  A stay in hospital for several days meant that our festival was short and quieter than originally planned.  I had intended to mark St Nicholas Day on Sunday 06 but all that was shelved completely.  Sadly we missed joining friends for their Advent Spiral but we were with them in spirit.  The Jewish festival of Hanukkah was last week which again we didn't mark.  But all the plans I made will not be in vain,  it is all written down so I can make use of it next year.

We spent two days marking the Festival of Plants, our focus for the second week of Advent.  We read the stories from the Reg Down book, sang our Advent song adding a new verse for the week and learnt the Christmas carol, O Christmas Tree.  We also read the Norse myth about Yggdrasil, a couple of short folk tales about trees and many of the Flower Fairy poems from the Winter collection.  There were other stories and poems we didn't read and we didn't do any of the crafting plans I had either, there is always next year.  We added some tree seeds we had found earlier to our star path on the seasonal table and the wee tree now has holly leaves and berries.

So it was a quiet, short festival last week.  It was as much as any of us wanted.  Now our attention is turned on the animal kingdom for the Festival of Animals.

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* the field in the first picture is the same as the one in the fourth picture in this post

Thank you all for you kind and thoughtful comments on my last post.  Alice is so much better than she was this time last week.  Sadly I am not fairing quite so well.  I picked up a horrible bug/germs of some sort in the hospital which I am struggling to shift, not helped by the fact that I haven't slept properly for over a week.  Our Festival of Animals is going to be a quiet week too.