Nativity Scene 2011 Tutorial part 2: Making The Sweets Garland

On one sunny thursday morning, few of us from St. Elizabeth region gathered at church hall, cutting and tying the ribbons while the tantalizing smell of speculaas cookies wafted in the air. Yup! It's the making of sweets garland!! The idea came from our coordinator Mrs. Sri, during her trips around Australia and Europe she saw christmas trees on the streets with red apples and gingerbread cookies hanging on them. Folks could pick the apples/cookies then donate some money into nearby basket. When I was in Europe it was not christmas time so I had never seen it myself, so can any of you tell me if it's really true?

I personally think this was quite interesting, because the previous nativity scene never had sweet stuffs on them. We hope the kids will like it and after christmas day, the sweet stuff can be picked by the kids. To implement the idea, we needed pine tree branches which was readily available, sweet stuff (candies, cookies etc.) and red coloured fruit (we chose apples and rambutans) and lots of small plastic bags with red wire and red ribbons, these can be bought at party supply stores in Jalan Cibadak. Overall they didn't cost too much, but the laborious part was packaging the sweet stuff into individual bags. However there's just one teeny weeny problem to the idea : vandalism.

You must be thinking VANDALISM?! Are you kidding me? Nope. I'm seriously talking about vandalism. On the previous years, lots of people took tiny bits of flowers, ribbons or the hanging decoration that attached around the nativity scene area, just for souvenir (this is one bad habit of most Indonesians : taking souvenir everywhere). Even last year during chinese new year season, some of the pine trees inside inner yard at St.Peter's Cathedral were decorated with tiny red angpao envelopes , no money put inside, just for decor only. And guess what, people took them anyway, and some none to gently, resulting in lots of broken tree branches *sigh*.

So with this sweets garland, our concern was that people would start picking the sweet stuff on Christmas eve (the 24th) so on christmas day (the 25th) the garland will look empty (empty garland looks depressing). To prevent this, there's no other solution : our coordinator simply had to guard around the nativity scene during the christmas eve mass..

Okay, lets move on to our tutorial. For candies, cookies or chocolates, first put them into individual plastic bags (detail 1) then secured the bags with red wire, overhang 4 cm of the wire (detail 2) this wire will be attached to the branch later. On top of the wire, put the red ribbon (detail 3). As for the apples, the wire must be tied all around the apples. For the rambutans, simply tied two rambutans at the stems. You can look at the very first picture above for the fruit detail.

Meanwhile outside, the workers nailed the pine tree branches around the stage. We then simply attached the sweet stuff here and there on the branches, and we're done!!! It looks cute right... We will continue on part 3 soon!!!

PS : I and my family arrived for the mass at midnight, Dec 24th and sweets have all gone .......

Note:
speculaas cookies by :

Toko Bagelen Abadi

Jl. Purnawarman no:49

Bandung

www.bagelenabadi.com