During the holidays, maybe you like to have sweets, but you don’t want to offer your children and the rest of your family cookies that are overly sweet. I have lemony cornmeal shortbread cookies for you.

I started with Ginger’s Cornmeal Cookies recipe from the Iroquois White Corn Project based in upstate New York. They grow, process, and sell heirloom Haudenosaunee corn. This isn’t white sweet corn but the corn used for masa, corn tortillas, grits, and hominy. This is not instant cornmeal, either. This is corn that takes a while to cook. This is the best kind of slow food.

Cornmeal and corn flour offers a great alternative for those who cook gluten free. This recipe, however, is not gluten free. This is a basic shortbread recipe that replaces 1/4 of the wheat flour with cornmeal. This particular cornmeal is rough-cut, giving the cookies a lovely crunch. Also, the roasted corn flour from the Iroquois White Corn Project has an amazing nutty smell. Try it, and you’ll want to find more and more recipes where you can substitute corn flour for wheat flour.

My version of the recipe keeps the ingredients but changes the way the cookies are shaped and baked. I used my grandmother’s old candy dish to press stars into the cookies, since I plan to give them as gifts. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it took less than a day for these cookies all to go missing. Each of the cookie thieves in my family have offered their own explanation, including my husband wondering whether there is some kind of mystery, “mawish” chemical in the cardamom. (Which he tells me means one can’t stop eating it. Likely story. Maybe it’s a British thing.) I now need to make a double batch and hide them so I can give them to neighbors.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup Roasted Iroquois White Corn Flour
1/2 tsp of salt
2/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
Zest of one organic lemon
1/ tsp ground cardamom

Directions

1. Prepare heavy cookie sheet by greasing and lightly flouring. Butter papers provide enough grease.
2. In a medium bowl, mix flours, salt, and cardamom; set aside.
3. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and lemon zest; beat until smooth. With mixer on low, gradually add flour mixture, mixing until just combined.
4. Use teaspoon or melonballer to scoop 1″ ball of cookie dough. Flatten each ball to a disk shape about 1 1/2″ across and 1/2″ high. Using the bottom of a crystal wine glass or any cut crystal, lightly floured, press shape into cookie disk until about 3/8″ high and set onto cookie sheet.
5. Chill cookies on cookie sheet for 2-3 hours.
6. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
7. Bake until edges are golden, 20-21 minutes.
8. Transfer cookies immediately to a wire rack; let cool completely.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.

Full disclosure: I’m a volunteer on the Iroquois White Corn Project. Over the past 16 years, I’ve worked with this version of the project as well as with the original project based in western New York. I’m very excited that we have this great corn available again.

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Buy buy buy. Messages urging you to spend money for the holidays can be relentless. Turn on your critical thinking now before you buy more than you intend to.

According to BMO Financial Group, Canadians are ready to spend this holiday season. “Canadians expect to spend an average of $1,610 this holiday season – up from $1,397 in 2011.” Shoppers in the U.S. are expected to spend just about that much with an average of $749 each on gifts and decorations and another $762 each on travel.

Overwhelmed yet?

What better time to watch The Story of Stuff and think about the consequences of consumerism. Yes, have a great holiday season. Yes, give gifts. But, don’t get caught up in buying something you don’t want and won’t ever use for the sake of a sale.

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On Saturday November 24th we’ll be celebrating the holiday season in Orillia and everyone’s invited. Join us for apple cider, sweets, in-store specials, hourly giveaways and more!

Holiday Fun on Saturday November 24th:

• Extended store hours! The fun starts at 10am until 6pm.
• Enjoy apple cider and sweets all day long.
• Saturday-only savings on gifts they’ll remember. Unique ideas for that special someone (and little one!) on your list.
• Door prizes drawn every hour on the hour starting at 11am!
• Wee Piggies & Paws will be available to make a lasting memory of your little ones. Handprint or footprint ornament only $25!
• Every gift purchase is entered to win a $100 Gift Certificate that we’ll be drawing for on Christmas Eve.
• Bring a friend and you’ll both receive a special thank you gift.

Event will take place at bynature.ca, 5 Ontario Street, Orillia, Ontario. Store hours for this special Saturday Holiday Event are 10am until 6pm. Everyone is invited!

Any family that drops off a cloth diaper donation for our cloth diaper bank will receive a second entry into our contest to win a $100 Gift Certificate, drawn for on Christmas Eve. Learn more about our cloth diaper bank.

Questions? Please call the store at 705-325-0506, send us a message on Facebook, or email us.

We look forward to celebrating with you!

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When I see my children in unguarded moments thanking one another for the help or kindness they give one another, I am incredibly grateful myself to be able to live in a positive environment where the people most important to me genuinely care for one another.

I didn’t actually witness the specific moment I am thinking of. About a week ago, my children were both so tired and whiny that I asked how they had slept the night before.

“I slept OK,” my daughter told me, “but I didn’t get to sleep until late. J was sad and couldn’t sleep, so I read him stories.”

My poor, tired son just nodded. They didn’t want to wake me or my husband, so she took care of her brother as best she knew how. She did for him the thing that comforts her, and it worked. He had been so tired but sleepless that he was crying, and she calmed him with stories.

How can we ensure that our children are thankful? I don’t think we necessarily can, but I have a few ideas how we might best set the stage for our children’s genuine gratitude.

First Step in Gratitude Is Giving

Before we ask children to focus on what they get, we need to help them focus on giving. For example, I think that my daughter’s desire to give helps her to be a thankful person.

Learning to be thankful is easier if we understand the flow of give and thanks from both directions: as the person who is thankful and the child who experiences others’ thanks for what they have done.

Awareness of Choice

Another important key to being thankful is understanding that others don’t have to give what they do. They choose to give.

If a person feel entitled to what they get, to what others do for them, they don’t necessarily see actions as gifts freely given. To raise a thankful child, help them recognize the choice in giving. Make sure that neither side of the equation—the giving or the thanks—is forced. If they truly understand their own choice in giving, they may be better able to understand that others also give by choice.

Receiving Specific Thanks Feels Good

When a child has experience in giving, they are more likely to know that doing good for others, even giving the smallest kindness, feels good. When someone thanks them for doing good, they get a positive feeling from the giving and the receiving.

A child can begin to see that they have a gift to give with their own thanks. Giving thanks is the gift of acknowledgment.

Model Thanks

If you model the thankful behavior you want to see in your children, they will develop a positive focus on giving and receiving.

Give them opportunities to say that they are thankful. Participate in rituals of gratitude. These could be as simple as going around the table at Thanksgiving and recognizing what each person is thankful for in their life, in the harvest, in their caring circle of family and friends, or on any level. The habit of stopping to recognize what one is thankful for can become ingrained.

Being thankful isn’t necessarily a comparison with others, as in “I’m thankful that we have a bountiful harvest this year because not everyone does.” Statements of thanks are more meaningful when they acknowledge the giving of others, as in “I’m thankful for the corn and potatoes on the table in front of us because my mother carefully tended them in the garden this year.” The more they are exposed to the specific and genuine acknowledgments for what they do, they more likely they will acknowledge and give thanks to others.

It’s the Giving

Raise thankful children by helping them focus on giving, both giving kindness and giving thanks for the kindness of others. When this kind of positive giving becomes a habit, there won’t really be so much distinction between the give and take since it can all be framed as giving.

In anticipation of next week, we wish all of our Canadian readers a very happy and bountiful Thanksgiving.

Image © Dmitriy Shironosov | Dreamstime.com

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Do you celebrate spring with your children? My kids are so excited to have the occasional gust of warm air that they are wearing shorts and short sleeves and shivering whenever the temperature goes above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. My children are ready to celebrate spring.

Despite the snowflakes I saw today, my flowers have certainly embraced spring as I see little purple faces peeking through the dirt all over.

Seasons Tree

When my children were very young, we always had a seasons tree to decorate as seasons changed. For spring, we blew eggs out of their shells and colored them to hang on the tree. When we moved to the desert, we started using carefully pruned tumbleweeds as our seasons tree! In the past couple of years, we have decorated the tree in our yard with colorful fabric scraps, which the magpies love to steal thread by thread.

A Seasons Tree is one of the suggestions Amanda Blake Soule makes in The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections.

The Seasons Tree is a perfect place to display your dyed, painted, and decorated eggs. Just glue a bit of ribbon, string, or fishing wire to the top of each egg, creating a loop for hanging on the branch (p133).

She also suggests bringing in some of those signs of spring to decorate your nature table: a budding leaf, growing wheatgrass, and a green play silk.

Birthdays and holidays are opportunities to acknowledge the spiraling of time and connect with the people we want to share our time. Whatever way you celebrate spring with your children, help them pause, breathe in the newly warmed air, and mark the rebirth of nature.

More Spring Celebration Ideas

• Natural Egg Dyes
• Pink Potato Salad

More from The Creative Family

• Garden Journal
• Everyday Rituals
• Toys from Natural Materials

Image © Frolov Andrey | Dreamstime.com

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If you are preparing for Spring holidays, chances are you will be dying eggs with your children. I’m always hesitant to you commercial egg dyes. If you are looking for more natural solutions as well, simple natural dyes can give you beautiful, subtle pastel colors of Spring.

Why Eggs in Spring?

Before commercial egg laying, Spring was the time for a chicken to lay the most eggs. They need a certain amount of sunlight per day, and they would anticipate enough time in the year to raise chicks to survive the next winter. The presence of eggs from birds of all kinds was a sign of spring. It makes sense that this and other signs of new life have been adopted to symbolize the season with the world begins to warm and wake from winter.

The subtlety of natural dyes on spring eggs makes a nice contrast to the bright colors of petrochem dyes. Natural dyes also give you and your children a chance to experiment and play in creating your spring decorations.

Basic Preparation

• Eggs
• Vinegar
• Dye stuffs
• Saucepan(s)
• Glass jars (so your child can see the eggs taking on the color)
• Slotted spoon
• Tray for drying (egg carton will work, but I don’t like the smudges it can make. I like a wire rack)

If using Cool Dip method, hard boil the eggs.

White eggs show subtle colors better, but brown eggs still make nice, earthy colors.

Whether cooked or raw, clean the eggs in slightly soapy water to remove any oils or anything else that could resist color.

Dry thoroughly.

Two methods

Hot Method for more intense, sometimes mottled colors

• Put one layer of uncooked eggs into a pan. Be careful not to crack the shells or you will dye your hard-boiled eggs as well as the shells, and you will just break your uncooked eggs.
• Add enough water to cover eggs plus ½”.
• Add 1 teaspoon – 2 tablespoons of vinegar. 1 Tbs works for nearly all dyes (see below).
• Bring to a boil then turn down to a simmer.
• Simmer 15-20 minutes.
• Remove eggs from pan with a slotted spoon.

If colors aren’t dark enough yet, put eggs and dye liquid in the refrigerator overnight.

If you leave an egg in vinegar long enough, the shell will dissolve. Don’t leave the eggs sitting in dye longer than overnight.

Cool Dip Method for lighter, smoother colors with pre-boiled eggs

• Add 3-4 cups of water to a saucepan.
• Add your dye stuffs.
• Boil the dye for 30 minutes.
• Cool dye (it doesn’t have to be cool but at least take the dye off the heat before adding hard-boiled eggs).
• Add 2-3 teaspoons of vinegar.
• Put dye in a clear jar for easy viewing.
• Carefully lower hard-boiled eggs into dye with a slotted spoon.
• Leave at least 30 minutes, though you can leave the eggs overnight.

Colors

Use 1-4 cups of vegetable stuffs or 1-2 tablespoons spices.

Yellow – Turmeric
Gold/Orange – Onion Skins (vinegar moves the color toward brown)
Pink - grated Beets, crushed fresh Cranberries, canned Cherries
Purple - Grape Juice
Blue – Red Cabbage (boil 30 minutes before adding eggs)
Green – Spinach
Brown – Coffee, Black Tea

Combine for other colors. Red Cabbage plus Turmeric, for example, make green.

Techniques

Use a clear, white, or light crayon to create resist patterns. Exciting for a child just learning to write her name. Useful for making dyed eggs look like natural, speckled eggs. For an older child up for a challenge, show him pysanky (Ukrainian egg decorating) for inspiration.

User rubber bands to create simple stripes. This is a striking effect and easy to do with children.

Keep Track

This is a great opportunity for your child to learn some of the art and science behind dyes. Have them come up with a hypothesis then test it with the dyes. Does red cabbage, for example, make red dye? (It doesn’t. It makes blue dye.)

If you are going to experiment with dyes from your own garden or from your local area, you might want to keep track of the recipes whose results you most like.

What dye stuffs did I use?
What method did I use?
What was my recipe?
How long did leave the egg?
Did a different length of time result in a different color?
What do I think of the results?
Add a photo if you can.

Next year, add to your egg dye recipe book.

Throughout March we will offer guides to getting started with some of the basic practices of attachment parenting and sustainable living. This is Spring Week with ideas, crafts, and recipes.

Image © Darryl Brooks | Dreamstime.com

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Holiday time is a time to consider community traditions as well as family traditions. My family is staying with in-laws in rural Suffolk, England, so we’ve been going to all of the local celebrations. Thursday, we went to a performance of local Molly Dancers.

This is a reclaimed local tradition that takes place between harvest and the blessing of the ploughs in early January. The disguised ploughmen dance while a group of ivy-covered women providing the music. “No matter what you believe and who you believe in,” said the umbrella-man, the announcer, “this is about Nature.”

Look into local traditions either where you live or where you travel, and participate with your children to give them a broad view of their cultural environmental.

Whatever holiday you are celebrating this season, I wish you and your family best wishes.

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The holiday tradition of spiced cider or mulled wine stretches from Halloween to Twelfth Night through all of the holidays in between. Wassail is most usually associated with Christmas now, but it wasn’t always so.

Wassail is both the drink and the act of going house to house asking for the drink. “Waes Hail!” is a toast. It means “Good Health!” When roving bands of young men showed up at the doors of the wealthy in a town, holding out their wassail bowls asking for free food and drink, wassailing more closely resembled trick or treating. For those who go Christmas caroling, the offer of a hot drink is from the same tradition. For my family, we keep a pot of mulled cider on the stove through the harvest and winter holidays.

If you are establishing your own family traditions, keep in mind that scents can be very evocative. Apple and cinnamon wafting through the house is one of those signals for my children that it is holiday time. Perhaps you might want to add wassail to your celebrations.

Start with a large stock pan.

Base drink. You can make a kid-friendly version with apple cider or even apple juice with added orange juice. We add a gallon of apple and half a gallon of orange to start.

Alcohol. If you aren’t feeding kids or you are making an adult version, you can start with red wine or hard cider. You can also add brandy, port, or sherry. Anything sweet will mix well.

Spices. Add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, or any of the sweet spices you like. You can make it all powdered or add whole spices for a beautiful look.

Sugar. I don’t add sugar, but most recipes call for it. Apple juice adds a lot of sweetness that gets thicker as the night goes on, so skip it.

Fruit. We add orange wedges with cloves stuck into the rind, and I’ve also seen apple slices added.

Warm without boiling. You want to let the spices steep for at least 30 minutes, but an hour or two will give you a thicker, spicier version. If you are serving at a party, continue to top it up with more apple and orange through the evening. Topping up is likely why the alcoholic version becomes more potent as the evening wears on.

Waes Hail!

Image © Gunter Hofer | Dreamstime.com

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A seasonal table or nature table serves as an indoor reminder of the changes of the seasons.

Many families and Waldorf schools add to the table as they find natural treasures like rocks, shells, twigs, small squashes at harvest time, new leaves in spring, and anything else that strikes the fancy of adults or children as they explore nature. The table often includes a setting created with play cloths, wool roving, figures from the toy box or the birthday ring, or even crafts. Whatever reminds us of the turning of the seasons is appropriate on a seasonal table.

Though we do have some figures and special items we add to my family’s nature table, we don’t create scenes so much as we display our found treasures of the season. The right way to create a seasonal table is whatever way you decide. Grow and adapt the tradition with your own family’s preferences.

If you would like to create a seasonal nature table with your family, start by choosing an area you can dedicate to the table. Make it high enough that dogs, cats, and curious toddlers can’t tear it apart, but make it visible even to the youngest members of the family.

Start with a walk in nature. Pick up what interests you and talk about it. For a very young child, try to follow their lead. My son filled his pockets on walks with golf balls and rubber bands, while my daughter was always finding stones. Try stick with natural objects, but don’t reject their personal choices. For older children, ask them specifically to look for natural objects that represent the season. Before you bring your objects indoors, brush off any dirt.

Prepare the table with a silk play cloth, piece of fabric, or other natural ground, then arrange your treasurers and talk about the seasons. Talk about how this season feels, but remind the child that the seasons will keep changing. It is cold now, and the pine cones have fallen off the trees, but in the spring new pine cones will grow on the trees. Those might be put on your spring table.

Avoid that nature deficit that seems so common in industrial childhood, and encourage your child to build an awareness of how nature works and how we as humans relate to nature and the seasons. A season table is a gentle way to help young children become aware of the way nature works.

Image © Nastasja | Dreamstime.com

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Whether you are bringing indoors evergreen boughs, a whole tree, or just a smaller reminder of the turning of the seasons, decorating with nature helps your child to connect with nature and the cycle of life, death, and new life.

This year, I adapted a velvet acorns project I found in a surprise issue of Better Homes and Gardens in my mail (which also brings up the question, why am I receiving a magazine I didn’t subscribe to?).

Collect Acorn Caps. I sent my son out to find acorn caps, and they only kind he could find were a bit rough, but we use what we find.

Wash the Caps. Before you use them for crafts, rinse the caps thoroughly then leave them to dry for a day.

Freeze the Caps. Before you use natural materials for crafts that you plan to keep indoors, you might want to make sure that you aren’t bringing in any small creatures with them. I freeze sticks, corn, acorn caps, or anything else that is going into crafts. Be sure they are completely dry before you freeze them, so they won’t crack, then leave them to warm up to room temperature before you start your project.

Fabric Circles. I have a lot of colorful, organic cotton fabric scraps, so I gathered a nice rainbow and cut 2 ½” circles. You can prepare the circles by making a loose basting stitch around the edge. If you have fast-drying glue, consider this optional.

Stuffing. If you have scraps left over from cutting your circles, bunch them up into a ball about the size of a cotton ball and hold inside one of the cut circles.

Glue. Put plenty of glue inside an acorn cap to hold the gathered fabric.

Gather. Pull the edges of your circle in around your ball of scraps, and hold the gathered edge firmly inside the glue in the cap until the fabric doesn’t try to pop back out.

Repeat. I spent about 20 minutes total cleaning acorn caps and creating a dozen fabric acorns.

Our colorful acorns are going with us to Granny’s house, where we will be celebrating the holidays this year.

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