Holidays at Home 2008--The gift of a 1.4my old fossilized Shell

I have had blogs before but none that I have kept up consistently, mostly because they were all for someone else and not for myself....one for a homeschooling community one to keep family far away updated but this one is for myself and myself alone. I want to inspire myself to create inspire my family to create and see the beauty and art in the world that surrounds us to see the meaningful things they can make by hand.

We do homeschool and my girls are now taking a sewing class weekly through who else? Hipstitch and they are learning so many skills that will carry them into their adulthood. They will not be throwing away a shirt because a button fell off. Even if they do not continue to sew they will know the value and time it takes to sew something by hand and machine.

Every year we do buy them toys--we especially like toys where they have to use their minds and imagination and/or creativity to play with...legos, plastic animals, dolls, even yes video games. And I make them things from me of course!

I have always attempted to make things for the holidays as I got older, mostly because I did not have the money to purchase but also because buying things started to become so meaningless. Something you have to do because someone gave you something and then a horrible cycle begins where you are trying to outdo each other in gifts and amount you spent on those gifts and the meaning is gone.

My favorite gift I gave one year were 1.4 million year old fossils that I collected from a phosphate mine in Florida. I loved paleontology and archaeology when I was a kid and just touching these things brought a thrill to know that they were from an ocean long ago. So I gave everyone a fossilized shell (I will get some pictures up later.) with a little tag that told what they were and how old and where they were collected. To this day some of those recipients still have those gifts displayed and others still roll their eyes and talk about yet another goofy gift that I gave.

I can never recreate that gift but I can always try to make the holiday meaningful again. The best we can do is try right?!









This is a conch shell that I found and it has a mineral deposit in it that makes it really cool looking.





Love those humongous barnacles and the giant shark teeth!




And this is a collection of some good samples of what I have leftover from that Christmas oh so long ago they are quite pretty and I am amazed at what I found intact....I even found a cowry shell with some shell color still on it!