We don’t have any real snow. Today’s high is expected to be 61 degrees F. We enjoy these warmish winters in California, our afternoons without a jacket. We also long for some honest-to-goodness, stay-home-from-school snowman-making days. Alas, we have to pretend.

I deliberately left some snowflake Christmas ornaments out this year, even though the rest of Christmas is all packed away. They help remind me that the season is beautiful, even amid the mud. Perhaps Mr. Bentley, the snowflake king, inspired me a bit.

I pulled out last year’s paper snowflakes. Lucas was into them last year and helped me make some. He’s got other things on his mind this year, though, (like creating creatures and writing about them).

Asher, on the other hand, thought I was a miracle worker when I cut new snowflakes the other evening and let him carefully unfold them. He was amazed and it was such a joy to see his rosy-cheeked face light up when the snowflake was revealed! Yesterday, after school, we taped the paper flakes up on our windows. Asher helped and thought it looked “AWESOME”!

“Mama, we could make a whole lotta snowflakes!”

“Yes, we can, baby!”

Paper snowflakes look nice silhouetted against an evening sky. (I sometimes cut snowflakes using paper doilies. They make for very lacy edges.

See? You can still have fun with skills learned in primary school: After the kiddos went to bed last night, I busted out some instructions for making five-pointed snowflakes I found on How About Orange. Jessica’s folding instructions are superb and while Ian and I watched Henry Rollins doing stand-up, I cut about five of these star-shaped snowflakes in various sizes.

Here are my five-pointed snowflakes at dawn. Asher was pleased to help stick them to the windows. I think they’re beautiful, if I do say so myself. I don’t know if my dear Mr. Bentley would approve, since this shape of ice crystal is not found in nature, but I think they’re lovely nonetheless. I expect to bust these out again next Christmas, perhaps with some gold foil paper. My thanks to Jessica Jones for the pattern.

Finally, I’m really enjoying this snowflake mobile that our friend Dakini gave us this year. It’s sweet, intricate, and lovely hanging in our kitchen—but mighty hard to photograph!

Although I used to go all out when wrapping gifts, in recent years I’ve become … let’s say …  somewhat busier and lacking time for such frippery. In fact, lately, my answer to labeling packages at Christmas has been simply to pull out my black or red Sharpie and scribble directly onto the wrapping paper. Frankly, it kills me to spend money on this stuff.

I’m still lacking time, but this week I had a sick boy home for two days with a fever, and whenever that happens he begs me to come up with things for him to do to pass the time at home while I’m working.

So, we made some simple gift tags from recycled (repurposed?) paper. Not fancy. Not fine. But fun, useful, and it couldn’t be easier.

Yep. It’s a paper grocery sack, cut roughly into squares and stamped with my two Christmas stamps. My mother-in-law gave me the snowman when she retired from teaching third grade. The tree stamp is one we bought to make gifts about five years ago. I love it when we can do a project without buying anything new.

I’m not sure why, but I love the paper that grocery sacks are made from. Maybe it was all those years I covered my schoolbooks with them. Anyway, if you follow the folds of your grocery sack, you’ll basically cut squares. It wasn’t at all important to me that they be perfectly square or all the same size, or anything like that.

Lucas did a great job stamping these. They need only a “To:” and a “From:” added, don’t you think? (There’s a job for my Sharpie!) If you wanted to, you could get fancier and paint on some glitter or something.

Voilà! We’re one tiny step closer to being ready for Christmas.

I have long coveted the window stars I’ve seen at the Waldorf school and in photos. I bought a book of how to make them a while back and got so overwhelmed by the complex instructions that I didn’t attempt one for a year.

Eventually, in my combing the Internet, I stumbled upon the right kind of transparent “kite paper” and bought it. My paper is square, so I can now make all the stars that require squares.

Many of the stars in this book require rectangular tissue paper cut to specific sizes and I haven’t tried that yet. I guess my rotary fabric cutter would do the job, but I don’t know if that would be bad for the cutter.

This star was pretty easy to make, although I had to ask Ian help me figure out how to assemble the five points into the star. It was confusing because the instructions were wrong in a couple of places. The book could use a good editor in its next revision, I think! Still, I’m looking forward to making more of these. They’re pretty.