Midwinter Festival

It’s almost midwinter and the rain that has been lashing down on our tin roof all day is a welcome relief in a country where you spend the first half of winter worrying about the rains not having started properly yet, where dams are still alarmingly empty after the summer drought, where we are all too dependent on a borehole, and a falling water table is a potential disaster. So rain = good.

Except that earlier this week, when a drenching cold front was forecast for yesterday, the date of this year’s winter festival, we were a little bit ungrateful. Luckily the weather angels moved it back a bit; so yesterday the bonfire building, the making of lanterns, the filling of brown paper bags with sand for candles were done under grey blustery skies, the strong wind worrying cautious elders; should we be lighting a big bonfire with forceful gusts ready to carry sparks all over the place?

But the angels had this taken care of too. We decided to keep going with the usual plans, bonfire, braai fire, tables and food carried outside, and once it was dark and we were ready to carry out our lanterns, the wind eased; not completely but enough for it to be fun sitting outside around a bonfire, so that kids with colds could stay out long enough for sparklers and soups, so that we could be thoroughly smoked, and even catch a glimpse of the almost full moon appearing behind scudding clouds.

Our kids are all teens now, but there are still several younger kids to take up the torch of eager excitement and anticipation, to run around in the dark and get a thrill from sparklers and legalised pyromania.

A new highlight this year was the beautiful origami phoenix, made by a 10-year-old friend especially for the festival, to be set ablaze ceremoniously.

It was so meticulously folded with such intricate detail that we were all loathe to see it go up in smoke, but Leo was determined that that was what he’d made it for.

It proved harder to set alight than expected.. he and his sister tried a sparkler applied to its tail, which started to catch and then fizzled out. So he took it over to the bonfire on its stick and dunked it right in to the flames, after which it blazed in spectacular style.

(No-one has been out to the fire remains yet today to see if a phoenix egg has been left among the ashes... but I guess it would be a paper origami egg and so would be now sodden in the rain!)

The original inspiration for our festival, conceived 14 years ago when we’d just moved out from London with two young children, was to indulge in all the winter highlights that otherwise fall in summer here in the southern hemisphere. So the bonfire and sparklers from the UKs Guy Fawkes night, the mulled wine and lanterns from English Christmases and any other fire themed extravaganzas that inspired anyone along the way. The festivals have evolved to be an occasion to gather with friends, to give thanks for the gifts of the season, to connect with the flow of the year and each other. And to feast, run about madly and catch up with friends.

When the kids were younger and several families of friends slept over, they’d be out by the embers of the bonfire at first light next morning, making new mini fires from any still glowing coals. This year we woke to the rain and the damper of high school exams tomorrow, with studying to be done. But there are still the joys of a lunch of extravagant leftovers, a fire to bit lit in the fireplace and maybe once studying is done a movie snuggled on the sofa.

Last year's winter festival.

Our Winter Festival Over the Years

Christmas in summer still doesn’t feel quite right for me, even though my kids have grown up with it. Sunshine, salads and a cold lunch are quite normal for them, though they always prefer it when it’s cool enough for roast potatoes to go with the turkey. So when we first got here we came up with the idea of cramming some of those wonderful winter traditions from my English childhood, sparklers and bonfires on Guy Fawkes night, mulled wine and lanterns at Christmas, into one big celebration of winter.

That first festival back in 2002 revolved around making lanterns and carrying them on sticks in a procession to create our circle (the circle that is now the centre of all our festivals). We then came back down the hill to light a huge bonfire and drank mulled wine. I think we had sparklers that time, if not then certainly by the next winter they had been added to the essential ingredients list, along with soups and boerewors rolls and an avenue of lights made from tea light candles in brown paper bags.

When the kids were smaller the most exciting thing about the evening was being able to run around outside in the dark, while the adults stood around the bonfire warming hands on mugs of mulled wine. Now the older ones have graduated to sitting around the fire watching sparks fly, though nobody has quite got too old for a sparkler or two, and licensed pyromania retains its allure.

Our festival a couple of weeks ago heralded the winter holidays and was a really lovely one. We had new friends join us and the kids did most of the preparation work themselves, with teams  decorating the archway,  filling bags with sand for the candlelit pathway and the boys building the bonfire. The Malawian couple who live on the farm joined us for the first time, intrigued by the whole idea, as in the days leading up to the festival Simon had been working on clearing some of the restios that were gradually overgrowing the sandpit.

Lanterns lit and ready for the procession to the circle

 The chilly wind died down while we were busy making lanterns inside and by the time the sun had gone and we were lighting the lanterns it was almost warm and completely still, the moon well up and the Venus Jupiter conjunction bright in the night sky. It really was magical as we sat in the circle, read our blessings and the vision prayer and coaxed the kids into singing.

Then a few of us rushed to the house to bring the soups and mulled wine out, others put a match to the bonfire and the men started braaiing the sausages around a smaller fire. We had a fine array of soups from butternut to lentil, chicken to beef and barley, as well as a bean stew. Two huge plaited loaves disappeared without any trouble and there were still boeri rolls for those with any room left. We were all loath to leave the fire so it was late before we eventually moved indoors for puddings, some of the littlest having already fallen asleep on the sofa inside, though signs of life returned once the scent of pudding was in the air.

Look for the Venus Jupiter conjunction just over our heads.

Licensed pyromania

Altogether a wonderful festival leaving us all feeling re-connected, to the turn of the seasons, to the earth and to each other.

Read more about our winter festival and building the bonfire

Autumn Festival

In almost every festival post I say something about how the festivals have their own independent energy and our autumn one on Saturday had completely its own feel. Whether we invite all and sundry or don’t send out any invitations and rely on friends remembering the date and getting in touch, those who are meant to be there come, sometimes creating a gathering of 40 or more, other times less than 20. This time three families of friends from Cape Town who are regular festival attendees couldn’t come for various reasons and so it was a small group of our local friend-family, with the gang of six girls who’ve grown up together through many years of festivals, in charge of the sand sculptures.

The theme for autumn is earth and harvest. When the kids were little it was all about making sand-castles decorated with shells and harvest things. We don’t have the rich colours of the Northern hemisphere autumn, the landscape is still dry and bleached after a long hot summer, but there are seed heads and dry grasses, restios and the fruits of the vegetable garden to remind us of the season. Now the children are older the castles have shifted to elaborate sand sculptures laboured over for hours, perfect sand balls, and stick and fabric light towers flanking the entrance to the circle.

I usually assemble a basket of things harvested from the farm as a symbolic thank you for the abundance of the garden. This year’s held almonds, tomatoes, a pomegranate, carrot and red onion. Last year’s autumn festival jar of strawberry jam was still sitting in the centre of the circle when I was tidying up, its contents reduced to a third of their volume, but still a healthy colour, not that anyone volunteered to taste it! And an enduring reminder of festivals past is the little almond tree, that grew from one of the almonds left there one long ago autumn festival and has managed to survive against all odds in the hot mini-desert of the sand-pit without any irrigation.

The harvest offerings the next morning, the little almond tree behind.

Our festival yesterday will be remembered for another thing. Earth Hour may be due next Saturday 28th, when we plan to switch off lights between 8.30pm and 9.30pm, but yesterday we had an Eskom enforced Earth Day, the whole day without electricity (due to a fault being repaired), which meant a complete shake around of any plans I’d made for baking quiche, biscuits, roast tomato soup and so on. It also meant that we had no water pressure, so dishes kept piling up on the chopping table while we hoped against hope that the power would come on before friends arrived, so we could do the washing up. It didn’t, so we reverted to the old method of boiling a pan of rainwater, and rinsing in the trickle of water that manages to come through the tap without the pressure pump.

And it turned out it didn’t matter. With most of the guests the kids’ friends, and the only adults our family and a couple of friends who might as well be family, it didn’t matter that things were less than perfect. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t get to the computer to write our blessings and retrieve the St Francis’ prayers, or that I never did make quiche. The bread was baked in my SIL’s gas oven, was burnt and very crusty on the bottom and slightly paler than usual on top, but it tasted good. I jigged the tomato soup recipe to a stove top version, only to remember that I usually liquidise it, which would er... need electricity... and luckily located the mouli-legumes than I use for guava puree, which did the job.

Olaf the Sandman feeling very relaxed!

 So it turned out to be a very relaxed and laid back festival, doing what we could and not fretting about the rest. The girls had learned one of the St Francis prayers as a sung version a couple of years ago and so opened our circle celebration with it. We all took turns to say our thanks and blessings straight from the heart and off the cuff, sent golden healing energy to a family friend who is fighting cancer, read the vision prayer together, and then the older girls played a few songs on the treble and tenor recorders, which always sound so evocative and medieval listened to under a starry sky with the chirruping of frogs as the backing vocals.

Willow loved her first festival, having a giant game of hide and seek among the bushes and restios

We walked back to the house under bright stars to flickering candlelight and slight chaos as we tried to find plates and cutlery in the semi-darkness. More and more tea lights were lit until the room had a gorgeous glow and there was just enough food to feed us all. After 8pm when our eyes were used to the warm glow, the electricity came back on again, so that we could dismiss the lurking worry about our full freezers, leave off the overhead lights and switch on just a few side lamps and carry on with the mellow evening. And luckily my SIL had made double quantities of choccie pudding so that everyone was able to have seconds.

More Autumn festivals through the years:
In 2013 it was just us and the same gang of kids, just two years younger.
In 2010 we had some fantastic straw angels and celebrated Earth Hour for real.
In 2009 more straw angels, some great pumpkins and a gorgeous sand mandala.

Easter, Simnel Cake and Stuff

A rather rustic Simnel cake

Easter is all but a distant memory already, the only witnesses to it actually having happened are the three baskets still overflowing with chocolate eggs in the larder, which have to be shifted off my box of flour and dry ingredients every time I bake. Oh and the Easter trees still dangling decorated blown eggs, even though I told the kids that we’d take them down again the weekend after Easter.

April has gone by in flurry of life happening too fast. First George had biliary fever, (not unusual for young dogs living on a farm here where ticks are an inescapable part of life, but it can be fatal if you don’t treat it) which luckily we caught early enough for one visit to the vet to cure quickly. Then that was put out of our minds by Middle Daughter getting sick, and staying slightly sick with a low grade fever for over a week. The first visit to our GP/homeopath revealed nothing more than a sore throat, even with blood tests, the second visit with X ray and more blood tests had us despatched post haste to a specialist physician in the hospital. He dictated an overnight stay, as she had an atypical pneumonia, sneakily lurking at the top of one lung where it’s hard to hear.

Never having been in hospital with any of my children (since Middle Daughter’s fall from a kitchen counter as a 6 week baby, don’t ask! – even more scary than this occasion) it was both an experience I never want to repeat and one that we both found an interesting learning experience. She was feeling tired but not all that sick and was completely stalwart about the horrors of having an IV drip put in, not once but three times, when they couldn’t find a vein that would do; this after undergoing the earlier blood tests, where it took them four goes to get a vein, and two lots of blood type thumb pricking, which seems to be just part of the admissions procedure. There was a whole lot of waiting around, very nice friendly nurses, who got us into a single room, so that I could stay with her, even though she is now old enough to be in the adult ward. Then there was the fun of ordering from the menu for the next day and pretending we were in a posh hotel (for the cost of an overnight stay it certainly felt like we should be!).

The lunch menu

Luckily our physician was very sympathetic and let us go home the next morning with a huge goodie bag of antibiotics, nebulising capsules and probiotics, and she got progressively better. After another week off school she had recovered enough to gather her Easter bounty of way too many eggs without staggering under the weight of them all! And now she just gets irritated when we check how she’s feeling, as she is completely better, back to school, riding again, as if nothing happened. Thank goodness!

About to set off on a farm-wide Easter egg hunt

We always have a Simnel cake at Easter, with its balls of marzipan enclosing a heap of speckled eggs. It’s a family tradition, one that my mother used to make, though now she says she hasn’t made one for years. My brother in Australia went all nostalgic when he saw my picture of it on Facebook and asked for the recipe, so I’m sharing it here and have promised to make it for him when we meet up in the UK in July at my Mum’s for a family reunion. I always use Delia Smith’s recipe from her Book of Cakes, but over the years I’ve found a couple of little tweaks make a difference, so here is her recipe with my adjustments.

Simnel Cake Recipe
Ingredients
175g/6oz butter
175g/6oz sugar
3 eggs beaten
500g/18oz mixed dried fruit/fruit cake mix
zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon
225g/8oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon mixed spice
3 tablespoons milk

Marzipan
350g/12oz ground almonds
350g/12oz icing sugar sifted
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon either brandy or sherry
1 tablespoon apricot jam
1 egg beaten for glaze

20cm/8inch cake tin lined and greased
Preheat oven to 150˚C 300˚F

First make the marzipan.
Combine the ground almonds and icing sugar in a bowl and mix well.
Beat the egg yolks with the lemon juice and brandy and mix the liquid into the dry ingredients.
Mix and stir and knead until it all comes together in a pliable ball.
You may need more lemon juice. Try not to overwork it with your hands as this can make the marzipan oily, especially on a hot day.
Divide the ball into three equal parts, wrap in clingfilm and keep cool until needed.

Now to the cake mixture.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Fold in the dried fruit and orange and lemon zest.
Sift the flour with the mixed spice and the baking powder.
Fold the flour into the mixture, alternating with the milk. You may need another tablespoon of milk if the mixture is too stiff.
Spoon half the cake mixture into the lined cake tin and smooth it out so it is level.

Roll out one portion of the marzipan to fit the cake tin.
Lay it gently on top of the cake mixture.
Spoon on the other half of the mixture and level it out.
Bake in the centre of the oven for about 2 hours until the centre is firm and springy.
Cool on a wire rack

When the cake is cool, prepare the rest of the marzipan.
Roll one piece out to fit the top of the cake.
Divide the other piece into twelve and roll into small balls.
Brush the top of the cake with apricot jam.
Lay the circle of marzipan on top and press down gently.
Brush the top with beaten egg.
Make twelve small crosses (arranged like the hours around a clock face) with the point of a knife and fix the balls around the edge of the cake.
Brush them with beaten egg too.
Put the cake under a hot grill for just long enough to toast it to a golden colour, perhaps 5 minutes. Keep an eye on this as it is very easy to go dark tan rather than golden glow(see my picture!)
Cool and store in an airtight tin.

And just a few pictures of our early morning Easter egg hunt:

The final haul being audited and re-distributed where numbers aren't even.

A Birthday Without Treasure

Youngest always has a strawberry birthday cake

This is the first year since our son turned four that there has not been a single birthday treasure hunt. Eleven years of treasure hunts. No clues to think up, no story to invent around a unicorn, a pirate or a fairy princess. No suitable treasure to find and package, no chocolate gold coins to ransack Woolies for.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or regretful. Relieved because treasure hunts involve a lot of last minute winging it and running around in circles, regretful because my kids are growing up so quickly.

Youngest turned eleven a couple of weeks ago. What she wanted for her birthday was to go riding with her friends in the morning and come home for an afternoon of play and then a sleepover. I thought I’d have very little to do. Just sort out with their riding teacher to move their Thursday lesson to Saturday, so that there were only two extra lessons to pay for, lay on some food and that’s that.

Of course having six girls for a whole day requires just as much cooking, if not more, than having twenty little kids for a tea party, so it turned out to be a procession of cooking: from soup and fresh bread for lunch, when they came back starving from their ride, to a strawberry cake for tea, and home-made pizza for supper... and then pancakes for breakfast next morning. I was kept just as busy as of old.

Youngest was rather dismayed to wake up to wind and rain on the morning of her birthday. The forecast was for drizzle and clearing up in the afternoon, but the ride was at 11... and this was way more than drizzle. We drove through a downpour to collect her friends, but used willpower and positive thinking in spades and by the time we reached the stables the clouds were lifting and the rain had stopped. Phew!

They had a lovely ride – what could be better than all your favourite friends and all your favourite ponies gathered together however windy and un-springlike the day?!










Then it was an afternoon of the next best thing to real ponies – endless games with Schleich ponies, and luckily the older girls haven’t yet become too grown-up to play too.

Our strawberries have been so late this season with the long late winter, that we only just had enough berries for Youngest’s traditional strawberry cake, but there were plenty of mulberries and the girls just ate those straight from the tree.

The birthday finished off with pizza and the movie I’ll be There, with that classic scene of Craig Ferguson riding a motorbike through the upstairs window of a beautiful old country house into a pond. One of the lovely things about the kids being older is that they enjoy many of our favourite movies.

And even without the treasure hunt, there was a wealth of treasure in memories and wonderful birthday experiences - I think it was one of her best birthdays yet!

Our Spring Festival and A Rainbow

Every year at our spring festival one of the things we are thankful for is the winter rain, filling up our reservoirs, re-stocking the ground water and giving all our trees a chance to grow. This year there was an awful lot of rain to be thankful for, as it had hardly stopped raining between my rather rose-tinted winter in South Africa post back in August and the festival itself on the 21st September. It had rained solidly for several days before and sharp showers continued through the day. The long dirt road to reach our farm was waterlogged and pot-holed: passable, but I was already thinking about starting work building a boat of some sorts, even if not an ark just yet.

Once again I left all the cooking to the last minute, not even getting my meringues done the night before for the pavlova and having to do the shopping in the morning too, probably the least prepared I’ve ever been. But of course it all came together in the end, quiches and potato salad, joined by roast chickens, other salads and potato bakes brought by friends, and the meringue cooled down just in time for the cream and berries to go on top. There weren’t any elaborate water sculptures this year, most people arrived towards the end of the afternoon, so there was just time to make flower crowns,

decorate the archway,

for the younger boys (and dogs) to attempt an elaborate construction for the toboggan to go down.

and to create a river of light from candles in brown paper bags.

And with true serendipity there was a beautiful rainbow to bless the occasion.

Every festival has its own rhythm and I’ve gradually  learned to go with the flow, not stressing about timing and details – it always works out perfectly in its own way.

Our flower crowns have changed and evolved over the years. When the kids were little we used to make tissue and crepe paper flowers fixed on to card crowns. Then we plaited raffia and now most of the children's crowns are made with real flowers, plaited into the raffia, which is a painstaking and very individual process.

Then there is the arch to decorate with flowers - pincushion proteas, bougainvillea and cable ties.

Because the theme is water, we have water bowls filled with flowers both in the circle and at the south end of the sand-pit. Amy thinks this is very convenient.

By the time we are all ready to carry our jugs of water and flower garlands into the circle the sun has set and it is dusk, but there is a glow in the sky still and a wonderful smell of fresh flowers and growing things in the air.

Blessings on the coming of spring!

More flowery spring festival posts for a little bit of nostalgia and seeing our kids growing up over all the years. 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and our blessing from 2006.