Happy Halloween: marking the festival creatively

Are you trick or treating with the kids? Waiting in, prepared for the trick-or-treaters? Looking for something to do to tap into the spirit of Halloween but not sure what? Here are a few suggestions.

Decorate your windows

with simple paper cut outs for silhouettes and tissue paper to get a nice glow. Simple, strong outlines work best: orange tissue for a no-mess pumpkin face (use black paper or black marker to make the features so the orange face glows) or a circle of white tissue with a black wolf or bat silhouette against it also looks good, as do spider and bat silhouettes in black paper straight on the window.

Remember the dead

This time of year has always been about honouring those who have gone before. A simple and unobtrusive altar or shrine can easily be created using photographs, momentos or items which symbolise loved ones, perhaps together with a candle for focus.

Write something seasonal

Here's a couple of fun exercises I've used with a keen student creative writing group around Halloween:

• Practice 'show, don't tell' by writing a paragraph in which a character is scared. You must demonstrate their fear as many ways as possible and avoid the word 'scared' and its synonyms.
• Write a poem, a brief monologue or a flash fiction piece inspired by an unusual phobia. A handy list of phobias is available online at the phobia list.

Practise divination

Again, this is traditional at this point in the year, when the veil is said to be thinnest. If you've got divination tools such as tarot or oracle cards tucked away somewhere, now is a good time to pull them out and give them a go. If you've never really got to grips with them, try shuffling and concentrating on being open to whatever you most need to know right now. Draw a single card and see what it says to you. Don't reach straight for the book or leaflet - what does the image mean to you? Do take notice of ideas that appear in your mind; a lot of good information is too easily dismissed.

For the more practised, here's a great Halloween spread, working on the principle of Samhain as a beginning and an ending and seeking guidance for the coming year. Simply draw three cards: what to cast off, what to hang onto, what to bring in. This can be done as a simple three card spread, or made more complicated by applying these three ideas to different areas that you want to focus on such as love, career, family etc.

What do you do at this time of year?

Family Friday: top tips for walking with kids

We've taken our kids walking for several years now. The youngest was probably three when we started regularly walking as a family (she'll be eight in a fortnight). We're not enormous distance hikers - five miles is a long walk to us, and we probably more regularly do around three.

One of these has been helpful but you absolutely can enjoy family walks without one! (She's only been with us for a year, and is out first family dog.)

So, here are my top things that encourage kids to enjoy the great outdoors:

1. Checklists of things to spot. This has easily been the most helpful single thing to get the kids involved. We have a book of family walks which helpfully includes checklists tailored to each route, but we also make out own for other walks. It's important for the list to be a mixture of easily-spottable things (depends on the route and sometimes the time of year, of course, but cows, acorns, swans are good standbys for us), specific features of particular walks (a windmill, a standing stone) and sometimes number-based challenges (how many herons can you see etc). 
2. Snacks - ideally hidden ready to be produced at a 'flagging' moment. As well as the obvious boiled sweets, dried fruit is good. Water is, of course, essential.
3. Stiles, brooks and livestock (ideally separated from you by a fence!). I could never have predicted the amount that stiles increase the fun of a walk by :) and paddling in or crossing a brook is also a joy. Spotting livestock is popular as well, but some kids are made nervous by walking through a cow or sheep field.

Do you have any to add?

Family Friday: Lob by Linda Newbery

A timeless, magical tale of the seasons and the passing of time for this week's Family Friday.

The hardback cover

The paperback cover

Title: Lob
Author: Linda Newbery
Publisher: David Fickling
Published: June 2011
Genre: Children's (7+)

Find it at Amazon UK

I found out about this book through the Awfully Big Blog Adventure Litfest, which featured (among many other fabulous posts) a discussion between Linda Newbery and Julia Jarman, talking about this book and Jarman's book Pillywiggins and the Tree Witch. Both went onto my wishlist at once, and Lob was one of the first books downloaded onto my Kindle.

The Blurb says:
Stand quietly in a park, garden, or the woods one day. Listen! Watch! If you are one of the lucky ones, you will see him. Lob! A green man.

You have to be a special person to see Lob, that’s what Grandpa Will says. Lucy’s parents don’t believe he exists, but Lucy does. And she’s delighted when she finally catches sight of the green man in Grandpa’s garden.

Then something awful happens, and Lucy's life is turned upside-down. Back at home in London, she wonders whether she’ll ever see Lob again. Will he come and find her?

My verdict: a glorious, gentle yet exciting story for young readers. Highly recommended for confident readers of 7+, or as a shared story.

This is a bittersweet story dealing with loss as well as the nature of belief. All of this is wrapped up in the story of Lob, a kind of combination of Green Man and household spirit. There is real magic here, and a story which fosters a genuine love of nature and all that grows, with an emphasis on the natural cycles of the world. Newbery's use of the Green Man is inventive and new, without departing far from existing ideas.

This book is extremely well-written and beautifully illustrated. It had a lovely old-fashioned feel to the voice, which is lyrical and would be great read aloud. The main character of Lucy is well-drawn and interesting: curious, enthusiastic and creative. I'm sure all child readers would find something in her to identify with. The relationship with her Grandpa is another high point and will be familiar to many children who find a special closeness with a grandparent.

Overall, there is much to commend this book: beautiful writing, warmth and depth of feeling, a healthy engagement with nature and its cycles, support for children facing loss. My 7 yr old has a real treat to look forward to!

This is my fifteenth review for the British Books Challenge

April A-Z: Life Lessons

I think that one of the most important things we've taught our kids is how to use the technique of visualisation for calming and to help them sleep.  I didn't learn stress management techniques until I was at uni, and it does take practice to really be able to benefit from them.  Obviously, I'm not suggesting life is stressful for our kids (at least I certainly hope it isn't), but these simple techniques have helped with the normal round of things like school worries, bad dreams and so on.

We've been much more consistent about it with the little one (currently 7) than the older (currently 12), and it does show.  Littl'un is much more likely to catch herself getting worked up and steady her breath without prompting.  She's had a 'bubble' to sleep in since she was very small: imagining a bubble of light around her, protecting her and keeping her safe.  This was a part of the bedtime routine for years, and has dwindled a bit lately, although she does refer to it sometimes if she's particularly tired or has had an argument at school or something.

She always liked to tell me what colour the bubble would be.  I encouraged her not to use red (too energetic for bedtime) or black (seemed too negative), and she'd usually go for a blue or purple shade.  Interestingly, when she needed cheering up, she'd often choose yellow or orange, which does chime with some 'received wisdom' about colour meanings.  Other than suggesting that red and black aren't 'good' bubble colours, I didn't influence her choices, so her selections imply to me that these associations (blue with calming, yellow with cheering etc) do have some kind of resonance at an instinctive level.  Kind of like aspects of myth and folklore.  Amazing what kids can figure out for themselves, isn't it?

What 'life lessons' have you given your children? What do you think families should provide in the way of learning?

Midweek Magic: Seeing in the Spring

Many of us are looking for ways to feel more connected.  Having left organised religion behind, and living in ways that aren't really community-focused, it can be hard to add meaning to the daily routine.  That said, routine can be just the thing to refresh our spirits and regain that connection to the earth.  In these posts tagged 'parenting with spirit', I'll share some ideas for using old traditions to awaken our families' spirits.

OK, so we're not here yet - but it's coming!

Last week, it was Imbolc: the earliest Spring festival in the pagan year.  In the Christian calendar, it's Candlemas or St Brigit's Day (derived from Bride or Brigid, a maiden goddess of poetry and blacksmithing, amongst other things).  Imbolc is variously rendered as deriving from 'ewe's milk' and 'in the belly', and is the quiet time before Spring really begins.  The first little flowers may be out (we've spotted snowdrops) and the days are beginning to noticeably lengthen.

Things we've done to mark this turning of the wheel include:

making or decorating candles
Yellow Moon sell brilliant candle pens, although we had more success with decorating big pillar candles than the little votive ones they stock for this.  Obviously, making beeswax candles is more in keeping, but that isn't always easy for the littlest ones.

spring-focused crafts
Again, Yellow Moon's range is excellent.  We discovered last Hallowe'en that tissue paper and silhouette decorations are great fun to make and it's fairly straightforward to cut out flower shapes from dark paper and stick tissue paper over to make the petals.  Ideally, use folded-over dark paper, so that you can hide the tissue in between.

other spring creations
My kids like writing (such a proud Mummy :-) ), so spring-themed poems and stories are good.  Prayers or songs to the earth, celebrating the shift from dark to light also go down well.  It's also traditional to make St Brigid's crosses at this time (a folded cornstalk equal-armed cross).  We've made them out of art straws in the past pretty effectively.

spring-focused walks
Just drawing kids' attention to the signs of the earth on a woodland or park walk is valuable and enjoyable.  They might look for signs of life on the ground or in the trees, or listen and look for bird life.  An old tradition has people (especially kids) stomping to wake the ground up after the worst of the winter, but you need to be careful where you do this.

Have you been celebrating the changing of the seasons?