This year, Sarah’s class invited any parents who wanted, to join them in making Advent wreaths at school. The morning after Thanksgiving all the kids all went out to the neighboring farm, and collected pine boughs. Then we met them back at the school and transformed them into beautiful wreaths. I had never done it before. Ever. In years past, we have almost always received a wreath as a gift, or I just bought one already done. So I definitely had a lot to learn, and was so glad there were so many experienced wreath makers in attendance.
First of all, I wasn’t sure what type of base to buy, so I bought two! One was made out of florist foam, with a plastic flat bottom, and one was a straw wreath already covered with small pine branches. We ended up using the florist foam one. 🙂 We were just about to start jamming in the little branches, when my friend, Bettina, stopped me. “You need to soak that in water for at least 10 minutes first. Otherwise you’ll have nothing but problems later.” Good to know! So we went and put it in the sink to soak, while we continued to cut the huge pine boughs into smaller pieces we could actually work with.
The florist foam was good because rather than having to wrap the whole wreath with tons of wire to hold on the individual pieces of pine, we just jabbed the ends in. It looked really pretty, even if it did make for a very large wreath circumference wise, in the end. I had also brought lots of cute little ornaments and ribbon to decorate our wreath with. And of course, we had the four candles, each slightly larger than the next, that we would light in turn, every Sunday until Christmas.
We had so much stuff, we were happy to share with anyone who wanted something. Sarah liked being able to hand out little pretties to her friends. 🙂 We still ended up bringing some home. Like I said, I had never done this before, and I wasn’t sure what I would need. And my motto is always, better too much than too little!
It was a bit tricky getting it into the car, since I needed two hands to hold the thing, it was so big! Fortunately, another friend was also leaving at the same time, and she helped me open the car door. I really didn’t want to accidentally drop it and ruin it after all our hard work!
It really did turn out beautifully, didn’t it?
That large candle in the middle isn’t part of the wreath, but we thought it looked nice there anyway. On New Year’s Eve I lit all the candles one last time, just for fun, while we ate dinner. The wreath had already given up the ghost, though, and as one of the candles burned down completely, the whole thing caught on fire! Someone just happened to glance over while we were at the table and saw the flames shooting up into the chimney. Good thing we didn’t have it on our table! Chris ran over with a glass of water and put the fire out, and we carried on without the candle light. 🙂
The next day I pulled off the unburned decorations, to save for next year and tossed the rest into the compost. Now that I sort of now what to do, I plan on making my own every year. It was so fun, and I really like that Sarah and I got to do it together. It made it that much more special.