Celebrating Michaelmas

 So many wonderful things have been happening this month!

Yesterday was the celebration of Michaelmas and we have all been looking forward to it for weeks. We've been reading all sorts of dragon stories, our favorite being The Knight and The Dragon by Tomie dePaola, and the children have been re-enacting the stories with the felt dragon and knight that make up part of our nature table this month :)

 I found this cute dragon craft on pinterest that we just had to make to *grin*. When you blow through the paper tube the streamers blow up like the dragon is breathing fire. It was a hit with my 6 year old and the added touch of googly eyes made it even more fun for him as he attempted to make the dragon make silly faces as he blew fire :)

 With all of the apples we had we saved a special basket of them for making a pie to go along with dinner and the kids made light work of all the peeling for me with this great little peeling gadget that peels, cores...

  and slices all of the apples into uniform pieces.

 

Not one part of the apples from our trees went to waste except for maybe the core but even then the chickens got those. L has a serious addiction to peelings LOL. 

 With the apples peeled and sliced it was time to make pie and legend has it that after Michaelmas you shouldn't eat fresh blackberries so of course we had to add blackberries to our apple pie which made it all the sweeter :)

 I had to time it right to get all of our baking done before the roast chicken had to go into the oven for dinner but we managed to bake the pie, sculpt and bake a ferocious looking dragon and even make a set of bread shaped swords to go along with dinner.

 This year I wanted to make our dinner extra special so we had my parents over and just before we ate I had everyone raise their bread swords and we recited the following poem.

 "Brave and true will I be,

Each good deed sets me free,

Each kind word makes me strong,

I will fight for the right,

I will conquer the wrong."

Since St. Michael is the saint of courage I thought this was perfect. I found it on one of the waldorf yahoo groups I'm on and don't know who to credit the poem to so if you happen to know where this is originally from I would love to know.

So after a little mock sword fighting with our bread swords we ate heartily and enjoyed the company of family :) 

Did you celebrate Michaelmas? I would love to know what you and your family did :)

Hugs,

Rosina