Saint Nicholas's Feast Day: Dec. 6

Download a free black and white PDF/coloring page of Saint Nicholas.


For more activities, craft ideas, lesson plans and everything Saint Nicholas, visit the beautiful and informative Saint Nicholas Center.

My plans are an adaptation of last year's plans:

For the Family: I will need to bake special cookies the night before. It'll be fun to do it while everyone is sleeping, so they won't know what to expect exactly. I'll use the Saint Nicholas doll from Paper Dali to decorate the basket filled with treats.

St. Nicholas's Day

This year, we will have a yummy special breakfast of hot chocolate and Haselnussmakronen (German Hazelnut Macaroons):

¾ cup (6 oz) sugar
1 cup (7½ oz) ground hazelnuts (filberts) or almonds
1½ tablespoons cocoa
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
2 egg whites
pinch of salt


Whisk egg whites until stiff. Add the sugar and continue whisking until the mixture stands in stiff peaks. Add the remaining ingredients and fold in gently. Drop teaspoonfuls of mixture onto a greased baking sheet at least 1-inch apart. Allow to stand. Bake in oven at 300° for ½ hour. Carefully transfer to a cooling tray and store in an airtight container. They will keep for several weeks. (From Feasting for Festivals: Customs and recipes to celebrate the Christian Year by Jan Wilson)

St. Nicholas's Morning
Then, the children will find their little shoes by the fireplace filled with some presents to open immediately. (This is wonderful because: 1) it directly relates to the story of Saint Nicholas and 2) it makes this day one for gifts and Christmas can be focused on the birth of Christ. Yes, they still receive some gifts from family, but they get their gifts from us on St. Nicholas's day.

We will drop off a "surprise package" of food and nonperishable items at our local homeless shelter. The food should be items that we chose together at the store.

We can play a game related to Saint Nicholas or St. Nicholas memory, and watch "The Boy Who Became Santa" in the evening ... while we eat more cookies, of course!

It's also the name day of our little one. He's just four months old, but he is named for this beloved saint, so we'll have to do something extra-special for that, too!

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O, Advent Tree, O, Advent Tree, How Jesse Are Your Branches

The Jesse Tree ornaments are being downloaded like hotcakes. If hotcakes were downloadable. I hope this means you're enjoying them as much as we are. This year, instead of putting our ornaments on the tree-shaped cut-out on the fridge (hey, sometimes, low-key is better than no-key), we are putting the ornaments on the Christmas tree. Which is really a Jesse tree if there aren't any Christmas ornaments on it. And then, we'll take down the Jesse ornaments on Dec. 23 and spruce it up in time for Christmas. Here's a glimpse of our Jesse tree branch:












Next year, however, I plan on getting elbow-deep in paint and glitter, and putting together some beautiful saint ornaments from "Under Her Starry Mantle." Check out what the ever-brilliant Aussie Annie has done for her Advent tree by visiting her blog:

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Works For Me Wednesday: Felt Puppets

Aside from my love of ink and paper, I also love felt. It's cheap (unless you want to pay a tiny bit more for the good stuff for gifts. Or not.). It's colorful. It's so versatile. And it makes a relatively new sewing gal like myself happy with her efforts.

This week's "Works For Me Wednesday" post is about the magic of using scraps of felt and leftover embroider floss to make finger puppets. As St. Nicholas's Day approaches, I need some little gifts for the kids. I read about making finger puppets at The Toby Show and decided to try my own hand at them.




They ended up nice enough. And they'll soon be enjoyed by my almost-four-year-old. :)

All you need is a little bit of imagination, a handful of felt and some thread and a needle. For these little guys, I just picked out the leftover felt from previous projects and imagined what I could do with them. The shark was the most fun but required a little thinking. The light-blue creature did not. As you can probably tell. The point is to have fun and use up what you have.

Get more tips for inexpensive Christmas gifts at Kristen's We Are THAT Family blog.

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