new year

education, food

KidsChaos-Calennig-AppleWhen my sister moved to Swansea a few years ago, she discovered some intriguing folklore we’d not heard of before – Calennig.

So Calennig is the tradition of New Year gift-giving – Giving these little apple delights pictured, to friends and neighbours will bring them good luck!

My boys, aged 11 and 9 are intrigued by this tradition and we are duly planning to visit our neighbours with apples punched with cloves, and ever-green leaves, and three little stick tripod legs – they are strangely delighted by this, and are dying to add some googly eyes (this idea has horrified several Welsh people!)

New-Year-Tradition-Hangout-RedTedArt

Another fun tradition is the Spanish Las doce uvas de la suerte, or “The twelve grapes of luck” – where a grape is eaten by the New Year’s Eve party goers on every chime at midnight, that’s 12 grapes, stuffed into one’s mouth, so much hilarity and spluttering of grape juice is had! The boys can’t wait to try this one this year, so for the adults we’re going to freeze the grapes for three hours, and serve them with dark chocolate (Divine being my chocolate of choice) and some Grappa, and for the kids, the smallest seedless grapes we can find for safety!!

For more top tips for New Year’s Eve ideas, from Maggy, Anthea and Kellycheck out the round up over on redtedart.com and for a bit of fun, watch us in a google+ hangout where we showcase LOADS of ideas on your screen here.

Oh, by the way, I’m also on twitter/MoreKidsChaos too… Erm, funnily enough on Google+, Facebook and Pinterest! Pop over say hello x LIKE IT? Pin it!

Ali also writes over on AGreenerLifeforus.com

kids, life

Chaos writes:

Every birthday, every Christmas, my lucky children receive new toys, new books, new STUFF – we have a rule of one in – one out, and it is SO hard to stick to!

Our lucky neighbours have slightly younger children than us, so they receive frequent hand-me-downs, and we are so grateful to them for allowing us to recycle our toys quickly and locally!

We go by the sorting-mantra “Bin, Recycle (via the neighbour’s kids), Charity” (much like the SKIP, KEEP, SELL, CHARITY piles on Aggie‘s daytime telly programme ‘Storage Hoarders‘ – very popular telly with my in-laws, who are fortunately following suit, they have SO much stuff!)

Having decided to have a bit of a grown-up clearout too, (it being NEW YEAR n ALL) I’m tackling my own STUFF bit by bit, I have recently joined the local branch of freegle for the first time, and have had a bit of a clear out, honestly, you’ve got to try it, it’s so cathartic… it gave me such a lovely warm feeling of community, I’ll chip away at our loft, so freegle, look out! 🙂