Las Posadas

I have twin 3 year olds who come to our home for daycare.  Patrick and the girls get along well and enjoy playing together.  Each week I have a theme for our stories and art projects.  Last week we did Hanukkah since it started at the end of the week.  We made dreidels, learned about the history and how it is celebrated, and made latkes for snack one day.

This week we are doing a "Christmas Around the World".  Today we learned about Las Posadas.  In short, it's usually celebrated in Mexico and a few other areas with strong latino influences.  For 9 nights, people gather to pray and then walk to an "inn" (one of the participants homes)  with 2 children dressed as Mary and Joseph.  They sing a song asking to be let in to the inn.  After 9 or so verses they are let in and everyone celebrates and eats a meal at the "inn".  We also talked about pinatas as part of the celebration.

For our art project we made mini-pinatas to hang on the christmas tree.  They decorated them and then we added yarn streamers to the bottom.  They didn't turn out so bad.  Patrick wasn't to sure about taking the picture though.