#swtlhp

Welcome back, sorry about the long absence, this year has been..for lack of a better phrase, a fking roller coaster ride! But enough about that, we’ve made it to my favourite time of year, SPOOKY SEASON!! Although this year is going to be a little tight I’m hoping I can still make it fun and memorable for Kee. So if you’re anything like me, Hi I’m sorry, you’ll have already started scouring the internet for ideas since like August and pinning and saving ideas left and right. Now is the time we actually sit down and start to make a plan and revisit those pin boards, so grab your biggest coffee cup, put on some Halloween ambience and let’s get to it! 

As we approach the hustle and bustle of the Holiday season it would be a great idea to gather your family around the coffee table (or kitchen table if the coffee table isn’t big enough) and have a little game night!

I love playing games with my family on these dark and chilly nights, especially spooky games, like Call of Cthulhu, Gloom, or even a horror themed D&D session.

Time together with your loved ones is always special but making it fun and spooky makes it even more memorable in my opinion. So while we don’t get to play games very much since busy lives get in the way when we do it’s just magical.

The last time we had a family game was a couple weekends ago and it…was a delightful disaster full of laughs and cussing, so take it from me, learn the game you want to play first before getting your family in on it lol. I am planning another game night with a game I’m a little more familiar with and while it’ll be made a bit easier since Kee is only 10, and really homebrewed, making a slightly spooky D&D game night shouldn’t be too hard.

So in planning this I want to share some ideas and a link to maybe help you the next time you want to plan a family game night.

So since I’m planning it to be a kid friendly D&D one off, I wanted to get Kee his very own dice set (mainly cause I’m superstitious when it comes to my own dice sets) so I bought him a set I know he’ll love that wasn’t too expensive in the chance he really doesn’t like D&D. Aside from the game itself, I am going to make a few little snacks to have while we play and with it being a spooky game I’m thinking of making some themed treats. Checking pinterest for those ideas is always fun for me, since I can find things that maybe aren’t spooky or creepy to start with but can very quickly become a goth-able delicacy with a few adjustments. Like cupcakes can quickly become GUT-cakes, and brownies can very swiftly create grave plots with a little imagination. This board on pinterest I have is where I keep recipe ideas I would like to try or use again and again, and while not everyone in my house is vegan (including myself) I have a fair amount of vegan recipes there since I try to help my tummy not hate me. Other than the game and snacks, creating atmosphere for your game is top of the list to make it memorable, and since it’s D&D that I’m planning on us playing, I have a couple ideas to eventually put into play so my kiddo has the best time, things like getting dressed up, drawing our characters, music, and talking in funny accents.

We may think our little ones don’t care or won’t remember the extra bits we put into family time, but they really do, even with the last game time we had Kee has been asking about doing it again, as he really liked the story telling part of Gloom. The little smile on their faces when you take the extra time to make family time even more special is the real reward at the end of the day.

Hello friends, welcome back to another holiday post! So today we’re talking about traditions, and along with talking about our family traditions I want to mention a few that I really like that are goth learning and fun.

During this time of year families around the world are working at getting ready for the upcoming holiday season, amongst shopping for gifts, decorating your house, planning the big dinner, they’ll find the time to participate in their own family traditions.

In our house we have a big tradition that we’ve been doing since my sister and I were little kids, and that was getting a letter from our Christmas Elves. We didn’t do letters to/from Santa, we got letters from the Elves from his Workshop and I loved that so much that even as a teenager I would still get excited about reading this letter (that I knew my mother was writing) from my Elf. So I took this tradition and started doing it with Kee, and while he’s not super keen on Santa, he adores his Elf. This year we’re kind of mixing it up just a bit and we’re doing our letters as a back and forth kind of thing. I bought a little mailbox from the dollar store and we plan on customising it to better fit our decor and Kee’s style, but essentially we’re going to “send” letters back and forth during December. This is a really cute and fun tradition for the holidays and honestly you can do it all year around with a little modification and imagination.

A tradition I’ll be doing for the first time this year is hanging a spider ornament in my tree, and while I don’t think Kee will honestly care much for the poem that goes along with the tradition of the Christmas Spider, I think by it being there he will ask the questions that will lead to the conversation of why it’s there. I really like the idea behind the Christmas Spider, a family not having much but still getting a tree to at least have something for the season, a spider spinning her web in the tree to make it her home, and Santa seeing this and turning the web into a beautiful addition to the tree to bring the family delight when they wake and allow the spider to still have a home in the tree. I do like it and I think over time Kee will come to cherish the Spider and it’ll be a great addition to our family traditions for the holidays.

When you look at our tree the night before Creepmas, you’re going to find an interesting addition buried in among the branches and other ornaments, the bright green shine of a pickle. The idea behind the Christmas Pickle, is that on Creepmas morning the first to find the pickle will get an extra little something, usually something small or even just a nice piece of candy. The tradition I believe started in Germany, the one to find the pickle said to have a year full of luck, and now days it’s used either as a way to slow down the present opening process by allowing the one to find the pickle to open the first gift, or they get to get an extra present. We do a bit of both but mainly as a way to decide who gets to open the first gift since Kee is an only child.

Another tradition, more legend but I digress is Krampus. In this house we love the legend of Krampus and enjoy reading about him each year. I look forward to Krampusnacht each December, where we make lump of coal cookies and Kay and I try to get through a holiday horror movie. This is a tradition more for Kay and I than for all three of us, since Kee is still a little young to try watching horror movies.

Along with the above, I always watch White Christmas at least once during the season, and Kay and I always watch Nightmare Before Christmas, and since a little small child I’ve always watched How The Grinch Stole Christmas. We make cookies, listen to music and sing along to the carols and for the last two years I’ve been making my own cards and wrapping paper.

For a lot of people it is now the “Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, but for those of us who may be suffering from the withdrawal of Halloween, that feeling is not yet here and so we haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit. Even more so, those of us who don’t fall under the Abrahamic faiths, may be struggling to fit our own beliefs or traditions in a very….established holiday, and so we are also not in the holiday spirit yet. But as it usually goes we eventually start to feel the wonder and magic of the holiday season, and I want to help that along a bit.

In our house (big mixed faith house to boot) we try to do a little something called “Keeping Religion Out of The Family Time”. This is where, when we’re together as a family (whether with my side or Kay’s side) we don’t do anything that leans into religion too heavily. Sure we still open gifts and cards and all that, but we don’t bring faith into our group celebration. Kay and I are Satanists, his side of the family is Catholic and Agnostic. My side of the family is also Christian and Agnostic. So if you couldn’t tell, we’re the odd goats out. So since we spend pretty much all day with our families on December 25th, we keep it toned down, and our families know not to bring up their faith while we’re present. Kee isn’t being brought up in any particular religion, so we don’t want him to be influenced by our families faiths until he’s ready to start exploring that path if he wants, and since we are firm believers that family is truly the reason for the holiday season in our house, we tend to shy away from the overly religious tones that some places really push.

So, in light of that here is how we’re making Hexmas/Creepmas/Anti-Christmas fun and festive and hopefully we can get you a bit closer to feeling the holiday spirit. So I tend to try getting things started in November, this includes starting my holiday shopping, getting my recipes together, planning my card list, etc. I always say I will start shopping early, since when you start in November usually it’s a rush to get things that aren’t overly “Christmas” themed, but I never get the chance or motivation to start (hopefully one day that will change, but it wasn’t this year). On top of that I usually try to get some handmade gifts finished by the end of November, again this year was a little harder since we had two big moves and I don’t have most of my crafting supplies in the house we’re staying at, so probably not a whole lot being handmade this year, but so is life. This year we’re doing an advent calendar, not a religious one, but a cute little gingerbread themed one where you open the little house and a treat is yours for the day. I’m doing mainly non-edible treats since we don’t want Kee to sugared up before he leaves for school and my mother (Grandma Mom) usually gets him a chocolate advent calendar anyway, so I’ll be tucking in cute little stamps, tiny toys, and some little handy things for our boogie boy.

Since we’re staying with my mother and Uncle at the moment we don’t really have a say in how the house is going to be decorated, however we do have our own room and this is where I’m going to really make the space ours for the holidays. I plan on getting some new bedding to really bring in a dark moody winter feel for our room, something in either plain black or maybe even the red and black buffalo check pattern in a comforter set and plain black sheets. With that I’ve decided I’m either making or buying goth-esque throw pillows for the bed to go along with our Jack and Sally squishmallows that live on our bed (yes we’re those types of people), something with a little holiday flare like bat shaped pillows with little Santa hats you can take off. I bought a tiny tree to have at the foot of our bed on the trunk that sits there so I’m trying to figure out how I want to decorate it, it’s 24” so I have a bit of space to work with and I’m not sure of how I want it to look as whatever I choose is going to have gothic undertones, so if I go with a winter woodland theme it’ll also be dark and moody, but if I go with a gingerbread/candy theme I think it would be a little easier trying to incorporate those gothic motifs, we’ll just have to see with that one, since I still have some time before I should really have it up. As for wall decor I want to go to the dollar store and grab a few sets of canvas and do up some seasonal paintings, or even use some holiday papers and make them look dark and delightful. These are just some of the ideas I have, and as they pan out we’ll be posting them on our instagram, so you should drop a follow!

As for putting a little Satanic/Witchy twist on the holidays we as our little three member family unit celebrate Yule, which falls on the Winter Solstice. This is a little more on the Witchy side since Satanism (to my knowledge) doesn’t really have an established Winter Holiday for December, but it stands to say I could be wrong and other branches of Satanism might have a December holiday. So with Yule we do also exchange a small handmade gift, we have a nice little dinner, and we enjoy the short amount of time we get with the Sun, once night falls we light a couple candles and have some time together as a family either reading, watching a movie, doing a craft project that we turn into a spell, or we play some games. It’s very simple and something that many people can do with ease. I love being able to enjoy a holiday and not have a huge amount of stress trying to make it perfect, just being able to spend time together is enough for me in that respect.

When I comes to the Church I belong to (*gasp* the Satanic Witch goes to Church? Well yes, I mean it’s a Satanic Church but still) I have yet to experience what they do, if anything, for the holidays as I just joined earlier this year, but I expect it to be as lovely as the other services/masses have been so far.