Momservation: If you never made an orange and black paper chain or a construction paper turkey out of your hand prints you didn’t have enough fun as a kid.
☺ ☺ ☺
I LOVE love love fall!
I think it’s because some of my earliest school memories as a kid were all the fun fall craft projects we did in class:
- Red, orange, green and yellow paper chains
- Orange and black paper chains
- Leaf collages
- Leaf rubbings
- Leaf garland
- Construction paper pumpkins with glitter
- Construction paper spiders
- Construction paper turkeys with feathers
- Construction paper turkeys made out of my handprints
- Indian headdress with construction paper feathers
- Indian vest made out of paper bags
- Construction paper Pilgrim hat
- Stations where you decorated a sugar cookie
- Stations where you made candles
- Stations where you glued glitter on pine cones
- Stations where you made something out of construction paper, glitter, buttons, feathers, beads or paint and your scissors got stuck to your hands with glue
And if all this crafting instead of learning wasn’t glorious enough…it was followed by a holiday party for Halloween, then Thanksgiving, culminating in the kid nirvana of Christmas crafts, stations, and parties! And it all started two weeks into school!
Seriously, school was much more fun when we were kids. Teachers aren’t allowed to do anything fun with the holidays anymore unless they can tie it to a benchmark, it’s passed a health inspection, and you’ve made it generic enough to not violate someone’s religious beliefs.
Anyway, these early impressions of fall stuck with me and it is all I can do not to go around gluing glitter and feathers on everything. I become giddy over all things fall and my family has no choice but to indulge this love with me by:
- Going to Apple Hill to consume copious amounts of apple related products and soak up fall descending on the Sierra foothills
- Decorating the house so that no surface hasn’t been touched by fall, Halloween or Thanksgiving
- Making crafts like using construction paper to turn an oatmeal canister into a jack-o-lantern or covering an apple with cloves or making cinnamon stick candle holders
- Cooking yummy things that make the house smell good like homemade applesauce or are fun to make and eat like graveyard pudding cups
- Doing anything together as a family to celebrate the season like going to a pumpkin patch, drinking hot apple cider, trying on silly costumes at the Spirit Halloween store, or learning how to make apple pie for the first time
If you’d like to join me in celebrating this glorious season that ushers in Christmas, I’ve created a Pinterest board of quick, easy, festive things to do with the kids to celebrate fall called Fun Fall Festivities with the Kids:
But I’m going to warn you. As rabid as I am about fall—it’s got nothing on my feelings about Christmas…and I’m way more fun than a teacher with a politically correct school board breathing down their neck.