After welcoming them to the house, I told them we would be traveling back through time and that I was dressed to take them through my 350-year-old house. I let them point out what was anomalous about my outfit and they eventually spotted my therapeutic sneakers (a big docent no-no! But this was unofficial). Bud also said that my eyeglasses were wrong, since Ben Franklin invented them, which he'd read recently in a book (and it's partially true--Franklin did invent bifocals, but glasses had been around, but not common, for hundreds of years).
We went inside to help the kids make their own mop caps (appx 18" diameter muslin circle with slits about 1.5" from edge and a few inches apart gathered with yarn) so they'd feel dressed for the period. While they worked, I talked about my costume--my layered skirt (and how I'd wear more and heavier layers for winter), my separate pockets ("Lucy Locket lost her pocket"), my always-covered head, how they had few outfits and only washed the layer next to their bodies (and usually only took sponge baths!), how clothes were not purchased ready-made but sewn out of purchased fabric by tailors or the women in the family (except during the war) and that clothes were patched and passed down because they were valuable, how boys wore dresses until they were "breeched" sometime in young childhood, and how girls never wore pants. This last fact shocked the all-pants-wearing troop the most. But that's because we didn't talk about how they didn't wear underwear!
Appropriately covered, we headed into the kitchen to talk about other aspects of colonial life:
- lighting by candles, oil lamps, firelight, increased by reflections off pewter plates or mirrors, but especially sunlight--how they woke with and went to bed with the sun
- heat only by fireplace, compounded by lower ceilings, smaller windows, heavier clothes and blankets, and foot- and bed-warmers
- transportation by foot because only the rich had horses or carriages
- sleeping altogether, with parents and siblings, in rope beds or pallets
- children's chores: sewing, helping with the cooking, cleaning (with a broom made of sticks), feeding the livestock, fetching water, carrying wood, gathering eggs (eggs were more seasonal then, with chickens not laying in cold months), making butter (another seasonal food because cows didn't give milk in winter)
- food harvesting (and the long tradition of harvest festivals, even before the official Thanksgiving holiday in 1863) and preservation, especially the popularity of drying apples and making pies to eat at every meal (and why you just couldn't leave whole apples in the cellar--rot, mice, thieving kids!). Also how the big meal was in the middle of the day.
- how water was not the drink of choice because it was easily contaminated and could make you sick; they drank cider and hot tea, often made from leaves broken from bricks of tea from China
Then, in the waning afternoon light, without turning on any electricity, they kids worked on weaving projects. I showed them all the tape, or ribbon, in my clothes--my cap, shift, and gathering my skirts--and demonstrated how it was woven on my replica colonial tape loom. Then they did some decorative circle weaving on paper plates (notch a plate with an uneven number of slits, set "warp" by crossing through center and passing to next slit, weave over-under in a circle, changing colors whenever), similar to the woven rag rugs they were all seated upon.
After everyone had left, while Mama and I were cleaning up, Sis and Bud played house in the enormous fireplace--sweeping, baking, stirring the kettle, churning butter, fetching wood and water. Watching them bring history alive for themselves is why I love being a docent.
Definitely a "Power Up" moment.
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