Winter Wonderland: Ice, Frozen, Snow and Storm

The first week of this winter holidays for us is all about Ice, Frozen, Snow and Storm. We had an awesome start to our holidays watching the opening night show of Disney on Ice Princess and Heroes at the Rogers Centre. Disney on Ice is a wonderful live show to watch with the family. We enjoyed watching the Disney characters coming to life and beautifully skating on ice. 

The colourful costumes, songs, choreography, parts of the Disney stories and special effects kept us entertained. Our favourite was watching the opening story of Jasmine and Aladdin in the market, and Cinderella and her prince in the carriage. The story of sleeping beauty when Prince Philip defeats the Maleficent, and Prince Eric and Sebastian trying to save Ariel was lively and exciting to watch.

Ice Storm in Toronto

We lost electricity last Sunday around two in the morning and didn’t have heat or electricity for 5 days. This was a difficult and heartbreaking experience we dealt with. It is quite hard to keep little ones and older relatives warm and comfortable without heat especially during long winter nights. 
We were thankful we stayed together with family and spent time with them. The nights they too lost power were long, cold and dark. These testing times reminded us of the simple blessings of life that sometimes we forget like warm food, heat, warm showers, clean clothes, warm bed and lots more.

Frozen

One of our outings during the ice storm to stay warm was to watch Frozen in 3D. We found Disney's Frozen to be an amazing family movie. The animations and the story line are well worth watching and it reminded us the “act of true” love, kindness and care. 

When we were watching Frozen we were expecting true love to be between Kristoff, the daring mountain man to kiss Anna and make everything right. However, it was the sisters’ true love and care for each other that helped. We found the movie to have lots of funny moments like when the snowman Olaf dreams of what a snowman can do in the summer, and the funny moments with reindeer Sven. We loved the beautiful Frozen castle that Snow Queen Elsa made. It also showed how beautiful winter could be, but at the same time very dangerous like the ones we were experiencing in reality.

The Story of Snow

We also learned about the beauty of snow crystals by reading and looking through The Story of Snow by Mark Casino and Jon Nelson. The beautiful photography, diagrams and explanations taught us the amazing things about how snow crystals come to be and how each of them are unique, but are common just like us. 

Did you know snow begins with a speck of tiny particles of dirt, ash from volcano, salt from the ocean going into the cloud and growing as the water vapour sticks into the speck and more and more vapour stick to form a water droplet. The water droplet freezes and sprouts to form a snow crystal until it leaves the cloud. The shape of the snow crystal depends on the wetness of the cloud and how cold it is. 

Winter Wonderland Stencils

My children enjoyed using the 20 reusable Winter Wonderland Stencils to draw and paint pictures of spectacular winter scenes. We can use these stencils to paint or draw on paper or windows. The stencils can be easily cleaned with paper towel and warm water and stored in the pouch on the back of the book until we use the stencils again.

This week of our holidays has been eventful and memorable, which has given us the time to reflect and be thankful.

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