We’ve been doing 3-D lollipop valentines for the last few years. Here is how it turns out when a normal family does this project:
PIC 3D lollipop valentine
Cute, eh? It is easy:
1. Take a picture of your kid extending a fist toward the camera. Leave some blank space in the background for the lollipop and message.
2. If you like, photoshop a greeting onto the image. If you are alert, you will remember how to paste things in with a transparent background; and if you care, you will be able to talk your kids out of choosing tacky images. (This year, I was neither alert nor did I care.)
3. Print out enough photos for the class. We use Walmart’s photo service – turns out fine.
4. Using an Exacto knife, make a slit above and below (or on both sides of) the fist. Insert a Dum-Dum or other lollipop through the slits, so it looks like the kid is holding a giant lollipop, and tape the stick in place on the back of the photo.
Here is what we have so far this year (before getting prints and inserting lollipops):
one standard (?) lollipop holder:
one kid who wants to have the dog holding the lollipop in his mouth:
one kid who is just a crumb:
and one kid who wants to have the lollipop going in one ear and out the other:
I’m sure the school misses the old days, when we were new and paranoid and sure that everyone would be judging us, so we tried extra hard to seem like decent people.
2. If you want to be fancy, you can paste the strips to colored paper — purple for the first, second, and fourth weeks, and pink for the third. If you don’t want to get fancy, just use them as is, or let the kids color the pictures in. Make a paper chain and hang it in a prominent place.
Then we put everything in a box, and when Advent comes, we take turns reading that day’s reading, and whoever made the day’s ornament gets to hang it up. One year, I cut a branch off an evergreen tree and stuck it in a pot full of rocks in the living room. One year, we hung the the ornaments from the ceiling in a line, leading up to where the Christmas tree would be. One year, very short on room, I cut a bare tree branch and bolted that to the wall. It has that gloriously weird, almost-festive Catholic look that unmistakably says, “SOMETHING is going on, but it ain’t Christmas yet!”