Since we were a couple days behind, I doubled up on the “Mary” and “Joseph” ornaments, and we did those the same day. We used clothespins for the people and cut felt and fleece for their clothes. The kids got to pick the fabric colors for the clothes.
“The most important part,” Mara told me as I began setting the craft materials on the coffee table, “is the jewels.”
Good thing she mentioned jewels, because I never pictured Mary and Joseph with jewels.
Here is Mara with her Mary and Joseph–before Mary got her head covering.
I enjoyed watching their looks of concentration while drawing faces on the clothespins. This was especially tricky for my three-year-old Micah. I had to laugh when he held up his Joseph-complete-with-a-face-drawn-by-a-3-year-old and said, “Look! Joseph is going like this! [cue facial contortions]”
His expression was exactly Joseph’s clothespin-face!
Micah, of course, wanted his Joseph to have a dark blue “cape.” Sometimes–maybe, I should say, even typically— the biblical narratives are lost on this 3-year-old boy, as his Joseph became a superhero, whose special power was camera-evasion!
Micah kept whoooosh-ing Joseph away, right at the second I tried to snap the picture. We laughed a lot together over Joseph. . . Superhero Joseph. . . Someday Micah will understand the real Joseph too.
