Lebanese traditions say; people plant wheat on St Barbara day as an act of sympathy with St Barbara who was hidden in a wheat field while running away from her father. Nowadays we don’t just plant wheat, we do lentils, chickpeas or whatever grain that grows nicely taking advantage of it to decorate later the Nativity.

With kids everything we do should be fun and attractive or they loose interest. To make this tradition more entertaining, i added to the cups where we planted the lentils, pictures for Nady and Joud’s face. Cut it on top exactly at the beginning of the hair to make the lentils stems look like hair.

And it was a good lesson on how we plant grains in cotton. Follow the images tutorial to see how we did it.

You will need cups, use the shortest possible so you won’t need to fill in with a lot of cotton. Make some holes in the cup to let extra water come out. Soak well the cottons in water before sprinkling the seeds. Don’t put them under the sunlight directly, in a shaded place where they are exposed indirectly to light.

I couldn’t find wheat to plant it so i only used lentils. But if you find wheat they will look much closer to hair.

Let your kids water them daily and watch them growing. They will love seeing green hair on their heads!

It’s a great lesson of patience as well. They will have to wait at least 10 days before having long hair 🙂

For those who were expecting some traditional sweets recipe, click on last year post for maakroun, and bon appetit!

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