Buon Natale!

For Eli's Holiday Traditions Around the World project, he decided to pick Italy as his country. He was inspired by J and V's honeymoon to Italy and wanted to learn more about Italy.  He even included postcards that J and V sent to us!

Eli had to make a poster and also give a presentation to the class. He was so nervous, but did a great job. He started it all with a loud "Buon Natale! That means 'Merry Christmas' in Italian." It took 30 seconds of nervous, silent shuffling before he could muster up the courage to start with that... ...but he finally did it and it was great!
The 2 things he was able to discuss really well were bagpipes and the legend of La Befana. He also talked about nativity scenes, Babbo Natale (Santa), and St. Nicholas Day....but he went on and on about bagpipes and La Befana. He didn't know how bagpipes worked, so I showed him 2 YouTube videos on bagpipes.  After that, he just wanted to tell everyone about them!  So cute!

For the presentation, he also needed to bring traditional holiday foods from Italy.  We decided to make panettone.  Man, I can make cakes in my sleep, but breads are a whole other type of animal...I am not a bread-making girl!  I am not good at waiting for things to rise a few times.  Also I tend to overwork the dough, so the bread ends up a little too dense.  It took FOREVER to make this bread (well, it seemed like forever, but it was about 3 hours).  Eli got so tired of kneading the dough.  It was definitely hard work!  In the end, it wasn't bad.  I even picked up a backup panettone in case it was completely inedible.  While I was at World Market, I also found torrone and pizzelles, which Eli had pictures of on his board.  I thought it would be fun for him and his classmates to actually taste the things he talked about.  Turns out, Eli is a huge fan of torrone...and actually, so am I!  It's delicious!

Here is Eli talking about how long it took to make the panettone.

We learned so much about this awesome country.  Buon Natale!