I do hope that people catch on to my dry sense of humor in some of my posts... :P
Anyway, last year, I shared a post about how we celebrated a couple major feast days that fall this time of year, namely St. Nicholas and the Immaculate Conception. (When you consider all the feast days, you'll find that being Catholic involves a lot of celebrating! We have a lot to rejoice about!)
After reading that post, however, I may have deceived you into thinking that what we do around here is pinterest-worthy and that we're super on-top of accentuating aspects of our Catholic faith as various feast days, patron saint feast days, and Church seasons come to pass.
But this year, I feature a down-graded version of these feast days because some years are just hit-and-miss. Sometimes, you get really creative ideas and are able to adequately plan some things out, and sometimes, life just gets a bit crazy or you just completely forget until the day before. (You're only raising a family here, c'mon, what's the big idea???) Some traditions remain standard and repeatable every year, yet may have to get simplified from time to time. As Catholic parents, we do our best to try and bring the Faith alive to our children but that's all we can do - our best. This, sometimes, might be something crafty or "homemakey" you come up with, or sometimes, you just don't do much at all because life happens. That's ok!
Anyway, without further ado, here is a recap of our St. Nicholas day celebration. I'll also do a comparison of last year versus this year.
Last year, we had the kids line up their slippers the night before to awake to a wonderful surprise that St. Nicholas dropped off!...
This year, mommy forgot to tell them to get their slippers out for St. Nicholas' little visit (even though I was planning to). So while they were sleeping I grabbed their dress shoes and lined them up...
Last year, I put a picture of St. Nicholas and their patron saints on their chocolate coins...
This year, I just didn't get around to doing that (ok, I printed them and cut out one...); and since I also didn't find chocolate coins in the grocery store, I went and quick picked them up at the dollar store....
Last year the kids had their friends over and made jars of St. Nicholas hot cocoa and we gave them out to people...
(Look how fancy I did that!)
This year we bought Pillsbury "Ready-to-bake" Christmas tree cookies the day before...
(Does not look as appealing)
Teresa is upset that her brothers are stopping her from putting the dough on the baking sheet
Do you see what I mean? This year, St. Nicholas day just wasn't as planned out as last year. We did go to our parish's St. Nicholas day party the Sunday preceding the feast (which they have every year) and our kids had a blast and got to see the original Santa Claus (whoa!). Santa Claus is actually a figure based off of the historical person of St. Nicholas, who was a Catholic bishop of Myra in the fourth century. He was present during the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. which gave us the Nicene Creed that Catholics have said down through the centuries and which you say today every time you go to Mass! He also valiantly fought the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ.
Ok, back to the party...
Lining up to talk to St. Nicholas...
Teresa walked right up to St. Nicholas and immediately said, "I want princess sheets!"
When the kids saw what awaited them on the morning of the St. Nicholas feast day, they didn't seem too disappointed though! ;)
Ronan pumped about the yogurt melts.
Later we made those fancy ready-to-bake Pillsbury Christmas tree cookies which the kids anxiously awaited...
We also read a few picture books about St. Nicholas during our storytime and had green and red M&M pancakes for dinner (which was impromptu because I was thawing out chicken already....).
We ended the feast day by watching a movie about St. Nicholas and then prayed before bedtime.
The day must have left such an impression that Joseph decided to do it again the next morning for his brothers and sister...
And that's that!
And for the feast of the Immaculate Conception today....I have nothing crafty or special planned. I'm going to make a nice dinner and put "the golden cloth" on our dinner table, but that's the extent of it. We'll probably read a book about our Blessed Mother too, of course. There's one we recently bought called Bernadette: The Little Girl from Lourdes. It's about St. Bernadette and our Lady's apparitions to her, when Our Lady referred to herself as the Immaculate Conception and the Church shortly before that clarified that dogma of Faith. But that's about it.
Oh wait...how could I forget? We're going to Mass! Yes, we might want to do this craft or that thing to bring our Catholic faith alive to our children, but the best thing we can do to illustrate to our children the importance of our Lord and the best way to bring Him glory and thank Him for all the holy examples He gave us through His Mother and all of the saints, is to simply go to Mass. We are making a stronger example of faith by doing that than all the crafts, good deeds, and baking projects we could do, combined. And on top of that, we are drawing down way more of an abundance of grace for ourselves and our families than doing any of those other things.
So don't fret. Just do your best and know that God honors and blesses all your efforts as a parent trying to raise faithful, Catholic children into true disciples of Christ! As you endeavor to go about this, my recommendation is to make fun of yourself about your "failures." This is another reason I love St. Teresa of Avila, because, if you've read her autobiography, she's bluntly honest and not afraid to be humorous with herself at times. Many-a-time, after losing my temper with the kids, have I found myself later saying, "Welp, there's me without You again, Lord!" Because it's so true!
In the words of G.K. Chesterton, "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
"The joy of the Lord is our strength."
~ Nehemiah 8:10