Family Feast Day Fun: July Q&A
Family Feast Day Fun…Q&A
What is living liturgically? Using the seasons and holy days of the Church as celebratory guides to how we bring the faith home, it’s not just Sundays!
What are the seasons? Ordinary Time, Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, with many feast days in between.
How can this be done in a regular, lay home (with kids no less)? Our household décor changes as the Church’s seasons change. Our family altar color matches the season, green for OT, violet for Advent/Lent, white for Christmas/Easter. The statues/artwork/crafts displayed match the season. Our meals reflect the feast days especially important to our own family (since there are so many). Treats for solemnities (the highest type of feast day) make those extra special too!
Where to begin if it feels overwhelming? Baptismal days and namesake days!
1- Baptismal days of each member: find them out (written on their candle or call the church office), mark your calendar. That person gets to decide dinner/dessert, light their baptismal candle, and recite the baptismal promises together.
2- Namesake days: whatever Saint each member was named after, look up their feast days, mark your calendar. Eat a meal/dessert that is related to that Saint’s story, or have the kids do a craft about them.
What’s beautiful about living liturgically, to me, is that we can tailor them to our own families. As Lacy from CatholicIcing.com writes about, we are “WEAVING the faith” into our children’s lives. Ingraining it into our family traditions, so that they remember holy days and what they signified. They’ll remember that we eat with our hands on St. Joseph’s day, they’ll remember we fly a kite on the Ascension. They’ll annually hear about these Saints and how they each lived differently but all for God. We want so much for our children to become personally attached to their faith; so when they are one day adults, if they begin to doubt the Lord, it will have to be more than just ceasing to attend Sunday mass to detach from. If it has been WOVEN into their childhood memories, memories of love and play and delicious messes, it becomes something more than a 1 morning-a-week obligation. God-willing, it becomes desired, to NEED the spiritual food of scripture and the Eucharist, and be inspired by the miraculous stories of those who loved Him.
God-willing, it leads to sainthood.
We are the Domestic Church!
Feel free to email me for any specifics, recipes, coloring pages, etc…Lindsay @ aldridge0222@gmail.com.