Advent adventures: day 8

Today we opened the eighth drawer of our tabletop advent tree. Inside, my children found a tiny trinket to hang on one of its branches and a strip of paper upon which was written a fun and festive activity. There's one of these for every day of Advent - I know that for sure because I came up with the twenty-four ideas, lovingly wrote them out and carefully placed one in each of the tree's diminutive drawers. I'm going to attempt to take a photograph to represent each day's little Advent adventure and post them all here.

Day 8: Make a Christmas postcard for a friend who's moved away

[We cut out images from magazines and catalogues, stuck them to plain white postcards and added a little glitter]

Sugar and spice

This week I have been enjoying my last days of museum teaching until January. The Geffrye Museum is looking gorgeously festive and is heaving with visitors. They all want to see the best of Christmas past; its rooms adorned with the winter decorations of bygone Londoners. Despite the crowds, everyone seems to love it - my school groups included.

I haven't been able to take my two children this year, but that hasn't stopped us from trying out a few festive making and baking traditions from the olden days.

We made Victorian Christmas tree decorations - bonbon filled cornucopia - as pictured above. These were very simple to recreate: the children cut gold doilies in half and then we folded them into cone shapes. After securing with a piece of sticky tape we attached shiny ribbon so they would hang like little baskets from the branches of our tree. And then came the most popular part - filling the cones with fruit jellies and pastilles. Beautiful.

We stepped back another 300 years to the winter celebrations of Elizabethan England and tried our hand at making sweetmeats. Authentic recipes would have used vast amounts of sugar - a real luxury then - in almond paste, milk jelly and crystallised fruit. These delicacies were flavoured with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Many sweetmeats were beautifully crafted into novelty shapes, and Marchpane was also popular. This looked rather like a flat marzipan cake, and was usually decorated with gold leaf.

Using marzipan for the base of our sweetmeats, we dusted our boards and rolling pins with snowy icing sugar and then had huge amounts of fun making our own novelty shaped celebratory treats.

Sam's Snowflake

I was back at the Geffrye Museum on Saturday leading the Christmas Nursery Rhyme Time sessions. The Museum is a perfect setting for festive fun as it currently tells the story of how London families have prepared for everything from Twelfth Night and New Year, to the winter solstice and Christmas over the last four centuries. The BBC has put up a slide show that gives a flavour of the Museum at this time of year: Celebrating the best of Christmas past.

In my sessions I adapted a children's story by Gillian Shields and retold it using props, actions, songs and craft. The children, aged between two and six, joined in enthusiastically and I was impressed with how their grown ups participated too.

In the story we helped Sam and his mother get ready for Christmas while they waited for his father to return from the forest with a surprise; he'd promised to get home before the snow.

Sam and his mother did their Christmas baking; making cakes, pies and biscuits flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg (we passed round spice samples for everyone to smell). They brought out their boxes of decorations and guessed what was within the packaging before revealing the contents (we used feely bags with vintage decorations from the handling collection for this).

All the while Sam kept wondering how long it would be before his father came home - and where was the snow? Sam's mother distracted him by showing him how to make a rainbow snowflake decoration using glittery pipe cleaners and pony beads (everyone used their twisting and threading skills here). The rainbow snowflake gave Sam an idea...

Maybe the snow had lost its way! He decided to make a glittery snowflake that would shine out of his bedroom window to guide his dad and the snow home in time for Christmas. He used a sheet of white paper, scissors to cut, fingers to fold and rip, and glue to cover it with sparkly glitter. Then he attached a little wooden stick to the back so he could prop it against his window pane. The children watched avidly as I showed them how Sam did all this.

The story ended with Sam's father returning from the forest with a Christmas tree, as it began to snow once more. Sam's snowflake landed magically at the top of the tree, where it shone and glittered like a star.

Everyone made a rainbow snowflake (candy canes, wreaths and even a spacecraft were created too), and then whole families sat on the floor together surrounded by paper, glitter and glue, making their own snowflakes on sticks; all unique - just like the real thing. It was magical.

O Christmas tree

And so the countdown to Christmas begins...

We have an Advent candle, a calendar, and a beautiful mini wooden Christmas tree to decorate with little baubles, one for each day of Advent. I know this sounds like a lot, but the excitement of sorting out who is going to open the even numbered windows of the calendar, and who is to decorate the tree on odd numbered days has been fabulous; it doesn't seem over-the-top at all just now.

Daisy was inspired by the wooden Advent tree and decided to make her own. Using it as a template she drew round its outline on thin card and then used watercolour to paint it green. I helped with the cutting out after this.

Much glue and glitter later, the tree was resplendent, baubles and a star adorning its branches. We slotted the two sections together to give the 3d effect and added a small piece of toilet roll cardboard as a sturdy base.

We loved using our new glitter shakers again - you can just see them in the photos. Buddy and Daisy can sparkle-up all manner of items independently with these. Glitter is great any time of year but it's just about essential during the winter festivities. I expect to get much more use out those little shakers over the next month.

Festive fare

This weekend Daisy suggested we make something sweet and Christmassy, so we decided to make the most festive of fare - mince pies. We flicked through our cookbooks and scaled down the quantities of ingredients because unlike so many recipes suggested we didn't want to bake three dozen. It was our first attempt after all.

In the end we opted for Delia's shortcrust pastry recipe.

4oz plain flour

1oz butter

1oz lard

2 tablespoons ice cold water

a pinch of salt

After the pastry rested in the fridge for half an hour we made the pastry cases and filled each with a tablespoon of mincemeat; shop bought, but good quality.

Inspired by Nigella, Daisy wanted to make star-topped pies. This was great because I could leave her to it as she happily cut out and transferred all the pastry shapes.

25 minutes in the oven at 200c and our nine little mincemeat morsels were ready. Once cooled, we dusted them with a little snow - icing sugar shaken through a mini sieve. Daisy loved doing that almost as much as tasting her own baking and between us all the pies disappeared incredibly quickly. Now I see why all those recipes are for batches of three dozen; we'll certainly be scaling up next time.