Martinmas 2011

Happy Martinmas!

It is cold and foggy here in Kent. It has been all day.  When trying to explain fog to Narina on the ride to our Steiner School play group she kept repeating "today is fecky". I haven't talked much of our special Friday ritual.  I am sure I will at some point.  It has been one of the best things we have invested in for Narina so far. Back to Martinmas, though. There is a wonderful article over at NaturalKids about some of the rituals that go along with Martinmas and links about whom "Martin" was.  For our family, this year, Martinmas was about light and lanterns.  It was about Narina building her own lantern for the first time.  In upcoming years the lanterns will get more portable and they will be paraded through the local village or community where she goes to school, but for this year it sat next to another lantern she built with her childminder a few weeks ago.  Singing songs I learned from one of the links on the NK blog I linked to in this post, we lit our lanterns tonight before dinner and just celebrated their beauty. 


Here are Narina's lanterns:

Here is the song we sang:

Glimmer, lantern, glimmer
Little stars a-shimmer
Over meadow, moor and dale
Flitter, flutter, elfin veil
Pee-wit, pee-wit, tikka-tikka-tik
Rucoo, rucoo.

Glimmer, lantern, glimmer
Little stars a-shimmer
Over rock and stock and stone
Wandering, skipping, little gnome
Pee-wit, pee-wit, tikka-tikka-tik
Rucoo, rucoo.