Martinmas is a long celebrated anchor point of the Waldorf year, however have you heard of Martinstag?. Literally translated from German, Martins Day – a celebration of Saint Martin.
In our endeavour to learn more about German culture and celebrations (because of having family living in Germany) we adopted this day into our homeschool year and its become a lovely tradition. Last year we had a few different activities and everyone is looking forward to marking the day again this year.
How to Celebrate Martinstag in your Homeschool
Read the Story of St Martin. This is a lovely start to the day, we snuggled up and read the story of St Martin. There are so many lovely stories online or Im sure you could get a book from a local library. We also looked at some of the medieval art I found this book online which is too long for a quick story but looks interesting. The story we read is here (its Catholic based), I also love the look of this Lego video if you don’t fancy reading.
Watch some videos of parades in Germany. We found out about Martinstag from my sister and brother-in-law who thought we would love to create our own celebration, having seen many of the parades and fun in Berlin every year. A quick search on Youtube will bring up plenty of results of little children and their Lanterns. We spoke about how different regions having slightly different celebrations and looked at our World Map to plot some of the places St Martin was, but also look at different German Cities. Martinstag / Martinmas is celebrated world wide in some shape or form so you can easily adapt where you are looking at!.
Bake some yummy treats. We made Weckmann, I can’t share a recipe because honestly they weren’t that great to eat. Ours also lacked a little clay pipe which I think would have made them look less creepy. We will try again this year and i’ll update if I manage to make something edible.
Martinstag Lantern Parade
The star of the show in our Martinstag celebrations was undoubtedly the lantern making and procession.
For lantern making we used a 5 litre water bottle cut in half (I sanded down the tops to make sure there were no sharp edges), we then decorated a paper sleeve to glue on. We have also used various glass jars with wire handles. You can see we had no patience in waiting for the glue to dry so the black you see on the lantern bottom is actually Duct tape.
We foraged for sticks on which to hold our lanterns, as seen in many of the videos we watched earlier in the day & off we went on our procession. You can actually buy lantern holders here if you fancy.
The best part of our Martinstag parade was our own resident St Martin actor & white pony!. Aka Leo and Sir Rocco who played his role as a noble steed very well.
You can watch our video of our celebrations over on my instagram – Click Here
