Friday Post - Christmas Wrapping

If there's one thing I hate about Christmas, let's say it's the ONLY thing I hate about Christmas, it's the wrapping paper.  Mounds of it.  Heaps of it.  And it all gets thrown out.  I've been making my own bags out of discount Christmas cotton for  few years now.  I did a new design this year.

I made a base square and  cut out a strip long enough to sew all the way around.  Then I folded over one of the short sides of the strip to make a clean edge.  I started sewing the strip onto the base from the folded side.

 I was pretty wobbly around the corners, because who cares.  Nobody is going to check for wrinkles, and it doesn't have to fit a person, just a lumpy present.

 When I got to the end, I let the long strip overlap.  I then sewed overtop of it, leaving the seam visible.

I cut two pieces of ribbon that were long enough to meet in the middle and tie into a bow along the width of the bag and sewed them onto the side edges.  I then cut one long piece of ribbon that was the entire length of the bag and sewed it onto the top edge.
I wrapped all of those ribbons around, and tying them to each other so that they tugged on the edge and closed everything off.

It looks a bit lumpy, sure.  But It's so much less mess, and they store so easily.  Heck, when it's time to put them away, you could use them for packing up all of your ornaments..

Plus, it's an excuse to buy crazy Christmas fabric.

The Father Christmas Letters

 By J.R.R. Tolkien

This is a compilation of a few of the letters that Tolkien wrote to his nephews and nieces while pretending to be Father Christmas.  There aren't many letters, and they're mostly interesting for Tolkien fans, not so much for little kids.

 The pictures are delightful.  It's really sad that not all of the letters were published.  Probably because some of them were lost.

At one point Father Christmas has a war with goblins and learns the goblin language.  The goblin alphabet is in the back of the book.  Kind of interesting.

Oops & Ohlala

 Illustrated by Amelie Graux

These books are pretty fantastic.  They're not comprehensive, and there's no direct translation of any of the text, so it's just basic exposure to both English and French in the same book.  I like to talk about the French sentences with my daughter, who at this point, knows a fair number of nouns and verbs, and can generally understand maybe one page out of ten.

 The outings that they go on are all trips that I do with my kids.  They even cover Christmas and Easter.  You can listen to audio recordings of the books for free on Youtube.  They have European accents (the dog is British).

Oops is the English speaking dog and Ohlala is the French speaking Koala.  I think they're supposed to be brother and sister... and they have a koala father...

But, you know, the kids won't care.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

By Barbara Shook Hazen
Adapted from the story by Robert L. May
Illustrated by Richard Scarry

My daughter picked this one out at the thrift store.  She insisted on it. She loves Rudolf.

Whatever.  Palatable Christmas fare.  It's pretty long winded, though.  At least it isn't a transcript of that weird Christmas special.  Don't get me wrong; the Christmas special is totally adorable.  But the script is crazy.  Santa and the reindeer are horrible people, and Rudolf should have just hightailed it and never gone back.

 This part is a bit weird, just because it has unnecessary details that don't make much sense.  I bet you Santa only brought the reindeer into the toy factory to break the elf union.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this stuff.  We're pretty anti-Santa for a number of reasons, which I guess could make us seem like a couple of Scrouges.  It can be really crummy for kids to be fed a bunch of lies about Santa and then finally find out the truth.  I feel, especially now that my daughter is old enough to play pretend, that it makes sense to pretend Santa rather than feed it to her as some kind of weird almost-religion.

Get Dressed Santa!

 By Tomie dePaola

It's a book about Santa having to use the potty.  So, if you're going to get a potty training book for a toddler for Christmas, I guess this is the one to get.

It's not so great.  The rhythm is uneven.  The rhyming is lazy.  The pictures are cute, though.  I love Tomie dePaola so much; I really want to cut him some slack on this one.

My daughter loves this book a lot.  But she still refuses to use the potty.