Yesterday was one of those days that I just LOVED homeschooling. The girls are a part of a Junior American Girls Club, and yesterday was our holiday party. We have been studying the Felicity books, so we had a colonial tea.
The girls are making lots of new friends, and they were all so beautiful in their Christmas attire. I bravely broke out (no pun intended) my china and (gasp!) my great-grandmother's depression glass and the girls dined gloriously. My new friend Charlene did the food, and the girls enjoyed cutting sugar cookies. She's from Ohio, so I made the tea. :)
We played games that colonial children played, like hopscotch and Froggy in the Middle (the barstool game.)
It was a lot of fun, but so much work. Here are some tidbits I learned...
1. Christmas in colonial times was rarely celebrated by children. It was celebrated by adults with foxhunts and fine dinners.
2. Christmas was not celebrated with a big feast. There was mostly meats and seafood, as it was winter and there were little fruits or vegetables. (That makes sense, but I'd never thought about it.)
3. There were no Christmas cards or Christmas trees- these traditions came later with German settlers.
4. Felicity's story is set in 1774, so among the colonists were loyalists and patriots. The patriots did not drink tea as a way to protest the king's taxes. The polite way to decline tea in the presence of a loyalist was to turn one's cup over in the saucer and say, "Thank you. I shall take no tea."
2 comments:
That is so cool! Love it when I learn something from someone's blog and I learned several things today!
We go riding the day after Christmas (Boxing Day) if the weather allows. My friends in England still go hunting on Boxing Day... it's a HUGE tradition there. I'm not a member of a hunt here so I just go riding ;)
Love the tea party idea! We've been doing colonial history as well and the traditions and things have been more interesting to the kids than any of the history facts!
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