In an effort to be both more cultured and more creative, I decided that this year, we were going to celebrate Michaelmas. Of course, I decided this on September 28th and Little Bear was at her Grammy and Boppa’s until the afternoon of the 29th so that clearly wasn’t going to happen. So today, one day late, we had our first Michaelmas celebration! I got the idea from a good friend, who will hopefully post about her celebration over on Rustic Remnants.
First, a little background: Michaelmas (pronounced Mick-ell mahs) is a celebration of the feast of St. Michael the Archangel. There is a lot of history associated with Michaelmas that you can read more about on Wikipedia, but suffice it to say here that it has been around since Medieval times and often is associated with the beginning of autumn. According to Christian tradition, St. Michael did great battle with a dragon in Heaven and, having defeated the dragon, banished him forever. Therefore, on Michaelmas, one celebrates bravery, a spirit of adventure, and the courage that will get you through the long, dark winter.
Around the world, celebrations include kite flying, cooking, fighting dragons, horse racing, picking blackberries, and enjoying the last days of warmth. With no horses (or blackberries) available, we focused on some of the other traditions for this, our first, Michaelmas celebration.
First, we made a dragon out of a paper-towel roll, some wooden beads, paint, fuzzy pom-poms, and crepe paper. Little Bear did most of the work herself and was very careful to both paint the dragon, and make sure to get paint in all the cups of the tray.
The original plan was to make a crown out of fall leaves and a felt strip. However, Little Bear is two which means there’s no guarantee she’s going to want to go along with an activity, no matter how fun it is. So I bought pretend fall leaves from the craft store and we glued them on together. By that I mean that she played with her princess dolls and handed me one leaf while I did the rest of the work. It turned out wonderfully, though, and she loved wearing it. She did not love brushing her hair to go to the park, but I think the wild look added to the charm of the crown.
We packed everyone up and headed to the park. We live in a part of the country where there aren’t a ton of deciduous trees and the unseasonably warm weather didn’t help things. We found a few trees, though, and some yellow grass which is kind of the same color…
Once we got to the park it was time to make a sword out of two sticks,
and start to chase the dragon!
Little Bear’s general m.o. when it comes to scary things is to run up and hug them when she’s done pretending to be scared. In this case, that included actually taking his nose from him and (when mama begged) trying it on for size.
But, while dragons live forever, Little Bear’s attention span doesn’t and she quickly decided she’d rather poke the water with her sword,
and run around looking for rocks.
Bug-bug, of course, slept through this whole thing and only woke when we were all marching back to the car, dragon head in hand.
The next part of our celebration was to make dragon bread. I have never actually made bread before so it was really unclear whether this was going to be a Pinterest fail. Of course, I built it up so much that if things didn’t go well, I was doomed, which is a great recipe for success in my experience. The cool thing about making this bread is that it involves telling a story that I got from Cypress’ blog post which you can read here.
Despite her general distaste for getting her hands dirty, Little Bear enjoyed the project and even did some kneading of her own!
While my sculpting abilities leave something to be desired, the bread actually looked ok (though slightly more like an alligator than a dragon) going into the oven and even better coming out. We let it cool and…
…chopped off it’s head and ate it right up! So now, despite the fact that it’s still 80 degrees outside, we’ve searched our souls, found our inner avengers, and have prepared ourselves for fall. I’m not usually a big seasonal decorator but Michaelmas put me in the mood so we’ll see what happens in the next few weeks.
Now bring on the winter!
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