Sarah Freethy

Creating a Fairy House is a really nice midsummer craft to do with kids and it's the kind of project you can scale up according to age, so it's ripe and ready to become an annual family tradition. Older kids can be their own architects, drawing and designing the house, scavenging for materials in the garden and then building it. Younger moomins might just want to help you find the materials and stick everything together (and probably to themselves while they're at it).

Take an old yoghurt pot or ice cream tub for a base, invert it, cut out a little door and then use strong glue to attach twigs and bark for the walls, stick overlapping leaves together to form a cone circle and pop on top for the roof. Once you've found a nice spot in the garden for it, surround the house with moss for a garden and decorate as you like. You can even add your own Cottingley Fairies if you're nifty with pins, paper and mild dissembling...

Not so much a tradition as a one-off custom, this one, but something I heartily recommend. It's taken me over three years to get round to it, but I've finally taken receipt of an item that I vowed to make before my daughter was even born; A Birth Book, with photographs of my pregnancy, her first baby pictures and beyond.

All children are tiny egotists, so having a picture book with a story that's all about her is my daughter's idea of a good read. It's a lovely way to mark a life changing experience, but also an incredibly helpful way of talking to children about their family. Everyone I know has an interesting and individual tale to tell, including adoption, surrogacy, donor conception, premature birth and a myriad other things that make life altogether too interesting sometimes. By making a Birth Book you can start to talk to a child about their origins in a sweet and simple way.

Of course, you can make strawberry jam at any time of the year, but I prefer to use local British strawberries in season, which makes it a real tradition instead of just any other jam. This is the perfect accompaniment to a summery scone...

Hull 1.5kg of lovely strawberries and heat them up with the juice of a lemon. Mash them and continue heating for a further five minutes.

Stir in 2kg of preserving sugar, pre-heated in the oven, until it all dissolves then bring to a rolling boil, timed for four minutes.

Put a dollop on a chilled plate, leave for a minute, then push it about to check it wrinkles up, then decant it into sterilized kilner jars.

Spread a little bit on a scone with a dollop of clotted cream on top, the Cornish way, which is only right and proper.

Floral crowns are a beautiful midsummer tradition, especially in Scandinavia and, while  they may bring you out in hives if you're allergic to that kind of hippy chick aesthetic, I find them beautiful and fleeting. After being subjected to a lot of plastic tiaras in the last few years, the natural beauty of flowers is a breath of fresh air. They're pagan, of course, part of our deep rooted attachment to the cycles of the earth and honouring that. As such, they're also pleasingly secular