the Candlemas festival

This past weekend our little festival group celebrated Candlemas, our fourth Candlemas together actually. (It's hard for me to believe it's been that long since we started celebrating together!)

We started with our usual candle dipping. Some of the kids have gotten good with their candle dipping and figured out how to dip both ends, stripping just a bit away from the wick on one end to make a very long taper. It's amazing to see some of the little ones who were just babies the first year of our festivals now dipping their own candles.

With plenty of play time in between, as sandboxes call to Finn, and many of the other children, we moved on to making seed containers.

The seed containers were rolled out of newspaper, filled with potting soil and a few seeds, then a gardening verse was added to each seed container.

The seed containers and dipped candles waited while we proceeded with the rest of our festival.

A tasty spread for snacking was laid, as always.  The little Pirouline candles in the center were the hit of all of the little ones.

Following our snack break, we headed back outside to the fire.  Several adults carefully melted scraps and pieces of previous years candles.

Once the wax was melted, we made earth candles by pouring the wax into holes that had been filled with sand and a wick.

The earth candles hardened for several minutes.

The earth candles, placed in a circle, were lit while we wrapped up our Candlemas festival.

What a beautiful celebration to welcome the light back to earth, to recognize the increasingly long days, and to help carry us the rest of the way to spring.