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December 6, 2025By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press
Advent has arrived, Christmas is coming, and, with it, the giving of gifts – in celebration of God’s gift of his Son.
Who might you gift with your gratitude or joy this season?
Maybe the new baby. You could present him with something to warm him on cold winter nights now and later teach him about the followers of the babe of Bethlehem.
How about children too young to sit still as the family or church group prays the rosary?
Or the teenager interested in ... you name it?
Then there’s the older person wanting to look and feel her best.
What about that priest, deacon or religious sister who’s helped you?
And don’t forget Fido and Mittens, whose ancestors may have been among the first to welcome Jesus to the stable.
You could gift all such people (OK, pets too) – without leaving home. In the process, you’d help a large family with Catholic college expenses, fun, even their own Christmas shopping.
That family – the Krestyn family from Holy Cross Parish in Templeton – owns HoneyMoon Hill Market.
They make their products at home and sell them at conferences, fairs, local stores and online at HoneyMoonHillMarket.com.
Customers can pick up completed orders at their house to save on shipping.
They sell, among other things, saint-themed baby blankets, rosary books, candles and all-natural skin-and-paw care products.
The mother, Monique Krestyn, says her husband, George, has his own business – Krestyn Woodworking & Construction. But most of their children help with the market.
Let’s get a glimpse of that work.
It’s a November day, and the family is preparing for tomorrow, when Mrs. Krestyn and daughters Helena, 16, and Lucia, 14, will display their products at the 2025 Diocesan Women’s Conference in Springfield. (They already sold some at the Worcester Catholic Women’s Conference.)
“It’s worth getting up early to do the fairs,” says Lucia.
Helena says fairs provide an “excellent opportunity” to Christmas shop – at other vendors’ tables.
“It’s fun” making the products. “It takes away from school time. We do our school at home.”
“Every so often we take a day where we do a ton of stuff” to sell, their mother explains.
Today their home is buzzing with “busy bees” making goods for tomorrow’s conference, other events and online orders. Francis, 19 months, is the only one here not yet ready to help.
Justin, 10, is stirring beeswax, shea butter, safflower oil and Vitamin E for Paw Protect. You put it on animals’ feet to protect them from road salt damage here, or burning sand in places like Arizona, he says.
Karolin, 3, can barely reach the kitchen counter to stack up the Paw Protect containers to which she and Blaise, 5, and Stephen, 7, have attached labels.
Peter, 12, displays the honey and goat milk soap he’s just made. He says he adds ground-up walnut shells to help remove dirt from your skin. Lavender scen
t is the best seller, and people also like lemongrass, he maintains.
Mrs. Krestyn extricates Christmas-tree-shaped candles from their molds. She says the trees are pine scented or unscented and they sell well. A bigger seller this time of year is the set of Advent candles – three purple and one pink.
“It’s really hard to get purple when you’re working with yellow wax,” she explains. Also for sale are pure beeswax tapers without coloring.
“The family we bought this business from did have bees,” and made “all-natural, beeswax-based skin care products,” Mrs. Krestyn says. When Jack and Colleen Seamon, owners of HoneyMoon Hill Bees & Farm, were closing up shop, they sold the bees and invited her family – among their lip balm fans – to take over the business.
The Krestyn children bought the skin care part of the business, aided by a loan from their oldest brother, Anthony, called it HoneyMoon Hill Market, and kept the logo.
The family kept some products, altered some, and added new ones, Mrs. Krestyn says. They developed new scents for creams and lip balms and created eczema balm.
“Festive spice is [the] best-seller during Christmas – it’s a Christmas scent,” says Lucia, who makes skin care products with Helena. They use beeswax and essential oils for body butter, body cream, diaper cream, therapeutic balms and lip balm.
Mrs. Krestyn sews baby blankets with images or symbols of saints printed on organic cotton knit, which she orders with the designs on it.
Awhile back, Miriam made younger siblings books of artists’ renderings of the mysteries of the rosary, her mother says. (Looking at the pictures helped keep the little ones quiet while the family prayed the decades aloud.)
This summer Miriam, now 19, edited the books and had them printed by Shutterfly to raise money to attend Wyoming Catholic College, where her brothers Nicholas, 17, and Anthony, 21, study. Their mother said there are four books with “completely different collections” of pictures; each book has one picture of each of the 20 mysteries.
When home from college, Nicholas does wood burnings – burning pictures into pieces of wood. He’s made portraits, wall art, Christmas coasters, tree decorations and keychains, his mother said. He can fulfill made-to-order requests, but orders typically take a few weeks to finish.
She said the money the various products bring in goes back into the business, and to family vacations, summer camp, even Christmas shopping money for the children.