the first year that mr. happy stuff and i were married, i sewed 24 of these little felt mini-stockings and we each filled 12 for the other person to celebrate the 12 days of christmas. we carried on the tradition for about 3 years before it fell by the wayside amidst the hustle and bustle of visiting family over the holidays. this year, i got them out to do an advent calendar for the happy baby. i thought a long time about what i wanted to put in the stockings. not bad chocolate. not plastic trinkets. needed to be small enough to fit…. in the end, i decided on a mix of three different ideas. the first idea is that i wanted a way to use the advent calendar to talk about the nativity story, so i looked for a 25-piece nativity scene small enough to fit in the stockings and kid-friendly enough that he could play with the pieces if he wanted to. most of the ready-made ones were pretty pricey or pretty ugly or too much of a choking hazard. i was attracted to the idea of felt finger puppets for each character, but thought that sounded like way too much work in a busy season. then i found this free downloadable version. the artwork is super cute, but tp tubes are too big to fit in these stockings (and i don’t have 13 lying around). so, i’ve been altering the art one piece at a time (sometimes just shrinking it, sometimes also drawing the “back” side so that they look like this:
the original artist would not give me permission to publish the art in the altered form, but if you’re interested, leave a comment and maybe i can e-mail you a copy when i’m all done? so… each day we open a stocking and it has a new piece to add to the nativity scene and sometimes a bible verse to go along with the characters we’re adding that day. on some days, there’s also a slip of paper with an activity (inspired by Elsie marley’s list) or a note to “read a christmas book” inspired by the popular blog idea i first read about here, but have now seen all over the place. i’ll write more tomorrow about my own spin on the christmas book tradition. i gotta go change someone’s stinky pants.
this one is an original! a few years ago, i was building a superhero storytime kit and realized i had zero flannel stories that worked with the theme. i stretched b-i-n-g-o to “there was a hero had a dog and bingo was his name-o!” but that wasn’t really enough (we usually like to include at least three options in each kit!), so after a fruitless search for something suitable, i realized i was going to need to write something myself. here’s the rhyme and 
i decided pretty early this year that i thought baby dude would make a pretty cute little squirrel for halloween and although i looked for an easy, mass-produced squirrel costume, i only found one and it was scary (since it incorporated a squirrel’s face on top of where my kid’s face would appear, not because it had bloody fangs or something), so i decided i could whip something up all by myself. it was actually pretty easy and if anyone is interested, i’ll put together a set of patterns and post them here.
we went trick-or-treating tonight with friends and our little mr. social had a blast going from door-to-door, charming strangers, trying to go into several of the houses, saying “thank you!!” with conviction, and going strong for over an hour, walking on his own two feet. i’m glad he’s not really aware of the allure of candy yet this year, but next year we may be visited by
