jam jar tradition time is here again
The very English school Christmas Fair tradition time is here again – making those decorated jam jars filled with little treasures and/or sweets. I must admit that I had completely forgotten about this whole tradition while away in China and the US, but the tradition hadn’t forgotten us! Sadly this year was a little bit last minute effort and scramble to go shopping with little miss C. for some treasures – and mostly we just had sweets and hair accessories to fill into the jars. As always, I’ll swear to start preparing for next year in June and have plenty of cute little beads, stickers and legos in stock for creating fantastic jars…and some fab fabric and ribbons for cute old-fashioned covers too.
The children got free hands to do their decorating with Christmas-themed paper, Christmas and winter-themed stickers, sparkly gel and jewels, ribbons and candy canes and boy – did they had a lot of fun! I didn’t have lids for all my jars, but kids created some from suitably-coloured gold and silver paper shopping bags (almost upcycling here!). The style points? mediocre maybe, but the fun time scope would be so over the top. And there were some leftover sweets to eat too…. (oh, and a couple of surprise jars, or rather golden takeaway-shaped boxes for a helping friend and her sister)
Now if you are not familiar with this British tradition (along with the charity shoeboxes filled with food at harvest times for local elderly and shoeboxes filled with little toys and hats etc for less well off or orphaned children abroad) it is quite simple: You clean up some pretty jam jars (I love the checkered Bonne Maman ones as well as the water-glass-shaped Nutella ones with plastic lids), decorate them and fill them with sweeties and little treasures (or either) and take them to the school Christmas fair. The at the fair you go and buy back quite a few different jars. The money often goes to charities and the little weekly allowances buy a few sugar rushes and little trinkets for the young ones. Simple win-win situations and such a sweet idea, especially as I no longer need to constantly gluing or so with the little ones).
Anyone else out there making jars for the school fairs? What are your decorating tips – I’d love to hear from you in preparation of the next year’s dazzling jam jar challenge…