Liturgical Living At Home For Families: Holy Week & Easter
Feast day and liturgical season traditions help our kiddos understand the Faith in their everyday space in their everyday life. The symbols and colors of the Church during each liturgical season can be brought home in many ways. Foods, activities, crafts, the options are vast.
This a big month, LOTS to celebrate!
*What season? Triduum, Easter
*Home altar color? Red/Violet through Holy Week, White once Easter
Upcoming Feast Days:
April 2- Palm Sunday and HOLY WEEK: Holy Week is our most revered week of the year. They are days of encouraged quiet and extra chores in our house, offering it up, and preparing for the big weekend to come. Wear RED to Palm Sunday mass, and if you haven’t already, cover your main crucifixes/statues in purple fabric as the Church does these last days of suffering in the desert of Lent.
April 5- Spy Wednesday: The night we remember that Judas chose greed over Jesus. A good activity is hiding 30 pieces of silver (dimes or quarters), having the kids find them, talking about greed, and then donating the coins to the poor box together.
*Triduum*
Holy Thursday: The night of the Last Supper. Sometimes we’ll try to recreate some of the dishes Jesus might have eaten that night of Passover, with sparkling juice for the kids instead of wine. This is a great opportunity to discuss the importance of that supper in instituting the Eucharist as a Sacrament, and the gift of the priesthood. We will also wash each other’s feet and talk about Christ doing that with His Apostles.
Good Friday: During Lent I hang bare sticks on the front door and tie a purple cloth to them. On Good Friday I exchange the purple for black, and we try to wear black this day too. The night before I try to prep Hot Cross buns, and they are baked this morning as our Good Friday breakfast. We will either attend Stations of the Cross, or do them around the house together using printable station markers. Starting at 3pm, we also turn off any electric lights in our house, and use candles instead until Saturday evening. A simple meal of beans and rice will feed us at dinner, to conclude our day of fasting.
Holy Saturday: This day we begin to decorate for Easter, which includes dyeing eggs and I will start to prep Easter food (being Italian I like to make Italian Easter bread, specifically). I opt for lamb decor in lieu of bunnies around the house, personally. We also have a Resurrection version of a Nativity we put on the altar, and the kids get to roll away the stone the next morning.
April 9- EASTER: Mass is the single most important part of the day! The phrase “Alleluia” gets to be spoken and sung again, especially our wonderful Catholic tradition of greeting others by saying “Alleluia, He is risen”, which is responded to with, “He is risen, indeed, Alleluia!” We continue to say this the entirety of Easter’s 50 days after our daily meal prayer. Assumption usually holds an Easter egg hunt Easter morning, so we attend that when we go to mass, in addition to the one with our own dyed eggs when kids first wake too. The Sacrifice Beans get replaced with jelly beans! We do a family Easter basket with goodies for everyone to celebrate our joy in the Resurrection as a family.
Something I like to frequently remind the kids is that Easter is longer than Lent, being 50 days long instead of 40. Each day we will hang a plastic egg from our mantle, which turns into 50 beautiful pieces of decoration, reminding us that it is STILL Easter. The octave of Easter is also special, which are the first 8 days, and we are encouraged to feast on all of them as if they are all Easter Sunday itself!
April 16- Divine Mercy Sunday: The first Sunday following Easter is Divine Mercy Sunday. We make Divine Mercy “sundaes” this day, and talk especially about the gift of mercy and St. Faustina.