Our Annual Winter PJ Ritual

For the past ten years, we have each gotten a new set of pjs to celebrate the winter holidays. We usually open them on Christmas Eve, sleep in them, and then open gifts in them the next morning. Each year, the pjs have a colored theme…this year’s color was blue (my favorite)…I believe last year’s color was blue too. I guess I should mix it up a bit next year.

I had been searching online for organic cotton fabric so that I could make the jammie pants. I made them the year Jolie turned two…they were blue flannel camouflage material and came out wonderfully soft. Jake is still squeezing his little self into his four years later (I made them big so he could grow into them). I found quite a few companies that sell organic cotton fabric, but the prices were seemingly pretty high. I was looking at $15-$20 per yard for organic flannel, and $12-15 for knits. Ouch! For the patterns I have, I was going to need 11 yards of fabric to make all five pairs of pants. You do the math.



I decided to give my local fabric shops a call just to see what they had in stock. None of the mom & pop shops had any sort of organic fabric. As a last ditch effort, I decided to check out JoAnn Fabric’s online store. To my surprise, they had organic cotton fabric! It is listed as a “cotton solid” and as a “quilting fabric,” and comes in eight different colors. In the hopes that my local JoAnn store would also carry the organic cotton, I stopped by while I was on that side of town running errands and found that they too carry the fabric. Of course I had my 40% off coupon with me, decided on the New Navy color, and got 11 yards to make the pants. It ended up that the fabric was already on sale ($5.99/yd; regularly $9.99), so I had to use my coupon on something else, which was alright by me. I was pleased that I had found the fabric for less than half the cost of other online companies.


The jammie pants turned out well. Since I didn’t make any of us jammie shirts, I had the kids wear their UU rainbow shirts that they had gotten last year, and we wore our UU principles shirts. The kids were all excited to open their winter pjs. They have each requested me to do an additional load of laundry here and there so that they can wear their pants again the following night.


I like our jammie tradition. Next year we will probably shift our jammie opening to solstice and possibly stay up all night wearing them. I have some other new traditions that I hope to start for next year’s solstice. I’m enjoying reading about other family’s solstice traditions on my UUHomeschoolers Yahoo! group. I look forward to morphing our holiday traditions into some that will be meaningful for our family for years to come.