And, best of all, it ushered that ‘Christmas is coming’ feeling. We haven’t decorated yet, which is unusual, because I like to have everything in place on December 1, but then this year I really seem to be trying (and failing) to catch up with myself—the Christmas pudding is steaming just now, and I usually have it ready by mid November. That said, the plan is to decorate between today and tomorrow, and we are starting to feel very festive. Or at least, I am, and am trying to make sure the rest of the family catches the Christmas bug.

Which neatly brings me to my Christmas spirit afterschooling plan. This month, I am selecting festive readings for Nicco, and mingling them with stuff on the Victorian era. That’s because we have the endearingly quirky (some would say outright bonkers) habit of celebrating a Victorian Christmas in this household. We started it in 2004, the year Nicco was born. We never spend Christmas at home, as we are either at my parents’ or at Manfredi’s, an we thought it would be fun for him, as he grew older, to have some memories of Christmas at home and some family traditions to call his own. And since the Victorians were the first to celebrate Christmas as we know it, we decided to have it Victorian style. We have Victorian food, eat plum (read: Christmas) pudding and indulge in Victorian customs (such as carols) which both Manfredi and I have come to appreciate during our married life but which are not common in either of our families of origin. No presents though—those are saved for the proper Christmas.

I must admit my family are somewhat critical of what they see as ‘too many Christmases’ because they believe it ruins the expectation and the atmosphere on the day. But it is also true that Manfredi and I, perhaps because we both left home when quite young, have a different approach to life and different traditions from our families of origin and it is our own traditions that we want to pass onto our children. Until now, Nicco was too young to really understand what was going on with our Victorian Christmas. We’ll see how it goes this year and then re-evaluate whether to continue or stop it.

While we do it, though, I want to enjoy it to the full. And that means reading the books that bring on the Christmas cheer. I haven’t drawn up a complete list yet, but I here are some ideas off the top of my head:

Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester

Celia Thaxter’s Little Piccola

Charles Dickens’ Christmas Stories

Clement C. Moore’s Twas the Night before Christmas

Maud Lindsay’s The Christmas Cake

I also came across Pearl S. Buck’s Christmas Day in the Morning, which is a real tear jerker for me, but I think Nicco is still a bit too small for it (though if it helped get him out of bed in the morning…what a blessing that would be!).

Meanwhile, here’s someone who is already feeling Christmassy..

Caterina in her Christmas outfit

Perhaps it’s because I am energised by cold weather but I love it. It has immediately woken up the Christmas spirit in me (not that it takes much to wake it up, but still) and I am positively raring to start baking cookies, decking the halls, wrapping the presents…

Mind you, before I get down to doing any of that—especially the wrapping—I actually have to *make* the presents, and that’s where I am lagging slightly behind. As in, I haven’t done anything yet. I have been sidetracked with my digital Christmas scrapbooking kit, which is now nearly finished, and with finding a good e-download selling programme, which I have now found.

The good thing, though, is that I can use the papers and stuff from the kit to make cards and at least some of the presents (the paper-based ones). It’s just a question of finding the time to do it all…

On my table today:

fois gras with brioche

pumpkin soup with prosciutto

chicken with chestnut and bacon stuffing

spicy sweet potatoes

apple pie with vanilla ice cream

and the infamous, mutant cornucopia…

But wait, afterschooling is a bit different from plain old reading. I sneakily choose books to fit a loose curriculum which I draw up every month. So, for example, because we are celebrating Thanksgiving this month, the ‘curriculum’ touches upon America, its discovery (with stories about Thorvald the Viking, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci), the arrival of the pilgrims (with a couple of stories on the first Thanksgiving) and the meaning of giving thanks and being grateful about what we have (with a bunch of moral tales).

After I read aloud the story, we look up places on our inflatable globe, watch the odd video clip on Youtube if there are any relevant ones, and most of all talk about what happened—what would you have done in Columbus’ place when his crew lost hope, for example, or were the children right or wrong in climbing on the barn’s roof in the Visit. Sometimes we play games that are linked to the book, sometimes Nicco tries to read some of the book’s words, and often we end up cooking something we read about.

That’s the essence of it, with the odd bit of counting, addition and subtraction thrown in (Nicco loves questions like: “If you have seven and I give you three more, how many do you have?” He also loves asking me questions, usually about numbes that, for him, are enormous: “If you have fifty and I give you a hundred, how many do you have?”). Oh, and we craft—drawing, painting, mucking about with play dough or clay…we do it all.

Of course, when I see he just wants to play, I back off from afterschooling. But he really loves reading and we tend to go through at least one story every afternoon. I bet he doesn’t even realise it is some form of schooling…

So we are busy getting ready for it. The food is there (in my mind, that is—the actual cooking will be a two-day job between Wednesday and Thursday) and the decorations are coming along nicely, especially now that Niccolo got involved. We made a Thanksgiving tree and shaped a horn of plenty out of DAS paste (when I say shaped, I mean sort of shaped—the horn got given some extraordinary ridges which make it look like a stegosaurus with no head).

The horn got painted today, and Nicco was adamant he wanted it to be blue, red and yellow. I could show him pictures of brown horns till the cows came home—he still wanted it multicolour, and in random patches please. Our mutant horn is drying now, and should be ready to be filled tomorrow with chestnuts, walnuts, pomegranades and grenadillas (not quite the traditional thing, I know, but they are a lovely shade of orange).

We’ll finger paint some turkeys next and turn them into place cards. I was hoping to find some more ideas in Five in a Row’s Thanksgiving ebook, which I downloaded today, but they had a Thanksgiving tree and a bread cornucopia, both of which we have sort of done.  Shame (although there are a couple of yummy recipes in there too, so I didn’t completely waste $6).

We are also reading up a lot on Thanksgiving, now that Niccolo is old enough to understand and enjoy what the celebration is all about. I have found loads of old, copyright-free stories to enjoy. Favourites so far are: The First Thanksgiving Day (from Wiggin and Smith’s Story Hour), The Visit (from Lindsay’s More Mother Stories) and The Spirit of the Corn (from Jenkins Oldcott’s Good Stories for Great Holidays).

Tonight we’ll start on Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving. It’s long, and Nicco is probably too young for it, but we’ll see if Alcott works her literary magic on him.

P.S.: the Christmas kit is coming along nicely. I am looking for a decent e-sales solution now, and hopefully will be in business soon!

Now, the book will take a while to finish (seen as I have only just started writing it) but the digital scrapbook kits are faster to put together and coming along nicely. I have been working chiefly on Christmas stuff, because that’s what I need for my own projects. Here is a peek at one of the vintage Christmas papers I developed.

Vintage Christmas digital scrapbboking paper

The papers are all ready, and will be up for sale in a few days as a vintage Christmas paper selection. The tags, ribbons, brushes and embellishments are in the making but, when ready, a full vintage Christmas scrapbooking kit will be available for download. While this stuff is ready to use for digital scrapbooking, it can also be printed out and used in hybrid or traditional scrapbooking and mixed media projects—well, the papers and tags can.

I can’t believe I am actually doing this, after having been sitting on it for an absolute forever. But I am so happy about it! Feedback, as usual, is much appreciated.

OK, if I had to settle for just one thing, the pictures would be it. Why do her children look so beautifully elegant and poised in a picture, while mine look like this?

Instead, I got more work, more work and even more work. Which is good for my finances, but not so good for my sanity. So my strategic decision is to try and keep the workload lighter and manageable until the New Year. This will give me time to make all the Christmas presents (I am already panicking), reduce my stress levels beyond red alert, and hopefully give some shape to my still nebulous plans for this blog and my crafty business.

And look after the kids, of course. The only non-work-related thing I have done over the course of the last two months has been to after-school Niccolo. I have been experimenting massively to try and nurture his curiosity, encourage his budding reading skills and generally keep him busy. The end result is my very own literature-based afterschooling curriculum, which mixes elements of Five in a row, Sonlight, Charlotte Mason and Old Fashioned Christian Education with some crafts and lots of hands on activities thrown in. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, is probably because you don’t have a child of schooling age.

So far, so good. Niccolo seems to enjoy it, although he doesn’t much like the copyright-free books I am getting off the Internet (which on the other hand I like because they are free, thus allowing me to cover virtually any topic he expresses an interest in at zero cost).  His reading is progressing apace, he seems to have a good grasp of basic arithmetic (he figured that two plus three equals five, and is genuinely obsessed with comparing sizes—of countries in particular) and his general knowledge of the world is expanding to a point that I consider almost scary—just a few days ago, after reading a story where a house goes up in smoke, he enquired about the levels of fire resistance of various materials. He started off with the obvious ones—wood, metal, cement—and ended up with: ‘How about carbon fibre?’

And he is definitely using his brain. He was trying to determine the biggest of numbers and, when I explained to him that numbers are infinite, he thought for a while then decreed that “so numbers come back where they begin—like a circle which doesn’t begin or doesn’t end.” For a four year old, it is not too bad a way to represent the concept of infinity.

Alas, his behaviour isn’t improving to the same degree. He is still headstrong and argumentative, although introducing a basic star chart seems to have made him ever so slightly more compliant. I console myself thinking he will make a good lawyer some day…

Meanwhile, Caterina has dramatically improved her gross motor skills—to the point that she is now a danger to herself. She has learned to propel herself on the baby chair (by pushing against the floor with her feet) and figured that if she grabs the side of her cradle with both hands, she can lift herself up. Both cradle and baby chair have quickly been retired after she took these exploits to an extreme and tried to get out of them head first.

Oh well, still a lot of work to be done though, and since I am Procrastination Queen, I have spent the last half an hour or so looking at the holiday pictures. Some of them are really fun (often in a horrid kind of way) and I can’t wait to scrapbook them all. until then, here is a snapshot of what we did last summer (after all, it is almost over. Today, it feels definitely autumnal over here).

The little Indiana Jones


getting the knack of swimming


Disco divo


Beach babe


Playing great-great-great-great-grandmother’s piano


With my great aunt


Taking the waters in Milan


At home in London


Mummy and papa photographed by Niccolo


New recruit


Relaxing at home


at hever castle, watching the joust


Fun at Hever castle


Baby pirate at Eurodisney


My two pirates