Advent Book Activity: The Legend of the Poinsettia & Poinsettia ornaments

For our sixth advent book activity we read The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie dePaola. Who doesn't love Tomie? Seriously. He's a genius. This is a great story, set in Mexico. Of course we had to make poinsettia ornaments to go with it. I got the pattern here, but revised it somewhat. We used juice can lids (from frozen orange juice) as a base. I cut a green felt circle to glue inside the metal lid. Then I cut the petals using the pattern from two shades of red and also from pink felt. We layered the petals together to make the flower. Then I pulled out my stash of buttons and let the boys each pick one. I sewed them through the center of all the petals and then glued the whole flower onto the green felt. The final step was to glue a loop of ribbon on the back so they could be hung on the tree.





These look sweet hanging on our tree.

On an interesting side note: I accidentally knocked over our other Christmas tree on Friday. One of the legs snapped off and we had to lean it against the wall. On Saturday I went to my favorite thrift store to see if Terri had any trees for sale. She didn't, but told me to go to the Episcopal church in town where they were having a cookie walk and rummage sale. She had been there earlier in the morning and saw two trees. I headed right over and found a tree nearly identical to the one I broke for only $10. So yesterday I took all the ornaments and lights off the broken tree and took it apart and put up the new one. When I was getting ready to put the lights back on I got a HUGE shock from the lights which were plugged in as I was untangling them. So I had to throw that strand of lights out. I was pretty tired of the whole ordeal by Saturday night so I waited until today after church to put the ornaments up on the new tree. Hopefully this one will survive until Christmas Day. I would not relish putting up a Christmas tree for the third time even though I love to decorate for Christmas.