Thanksgiving Holiday Helper

Living Books Curriculum, a great Charlotte Mason resource, has free "Holiday Helper" packets for several holidays throughout the year. I like them because they include beautiful poems, stories and art for a picture study. Beautiful and enticing first-person accounts for a young child. By all means, go ahead and make a hand print turkey, but try reading a beautiful Thanksgiving poem, too! You can download the Thanksgiving Helper at CurrClick for free.

The Feast of St. Nicholas

We are all trying hard not to get sucked into the commercialism of Christmas that has been surrounding us since August, but it bears mentioning that Advent is just around the corner and we as mothers have a unique opportunity to establish special family traditions that orient ourselves and our children towards the cradle on Christmas Day.

It is not too early to start planning a few ways to make the meaning of the season come alive for your little ones. We love St. Nicholas in the Incredible household and we have celebrated his feast for several years. He is the patron saint of children, among many other things. We will be out of town this year for the Feast of St. Nicholas (on Saturday, December 6th), so I have been planning how to keep our traditions going away from home. We enjoy teaching our children about the real Santa Claus and encouraging them to demonstrate brotherly love.

If you want to order cookie cutters or prayer cards, now is the time! The St. Nicholas Center is a veritable treasure trove of information, stories, games, coloring pages, supplies, and ideas for all ages. Take a few minutes to click around and pick an activity that you think will connect with your children.

As with most things in the Incredible house, food is a very important part of celebrating. There are great recipes for traditional spiced gingerbread cookies and ideas for decorating them. Even if you can't afford the neat cookie cutters, you can use a knife and a little icing to turn them into St. Nicholas.

Another great source of ideas are the archives at O Night Divine. Here are book suggestions, and here are other ideas for celebrating his feast day.

With MaryAlice's encouragement to get ready and think ahead to make this time of year less stressful, take a few minutes to put some St. Nicholas and Advent books on hold at your library and make sure you have the ingredients for gingerbread in your pantry as we begin to prepare for this special time of year!

Going Green Take 3

While the Feast of St. Patrick (March 17) is suppressed this year because it falls during Holy Week (unless you live in a diocese where St. Patrick is the patron...then it's moved to March 14), I have grown up celebrating St. Patrick's Day and simply can't make it through the month of March without corned beef and lots of green.

Going to a Catholic grade school growing up, we were allowed the very rare opportunity to forgo our uniforms and wear green on St. Patrick's Day. There is nothing better than telling an 8 year old she can wear jeans and a green t-shirt to school instead of her uniform. Hence, St. Patrick has always held a special place in my heart!

Sometimes I get over eager to share about all the saints with my 2.5 year old. The truth is, he is not quite ready to learn about each and every saint in the Church calendar. So I have found it more satisfying to spend several weeks talking about a particular saint and spreading out activities that make virtues or history more concrete. So we have already had a week of stories and talking about St. Patrick and more is on the way. So far, Dash really loves that Patrick taught about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit using the shamrock leaves. We will bring in the image of the rainbow this week.

We have several books on St. Patrick. Pingry's book prompted us to look up some Irish jig music and have a rousing Irish dance. We made salt dough shamrocks and painted them green. As always, catholicculture.org has great historical and activity info. We tried to bake shamrock cupcakes but they didn't really come out since we made a rich, homemade cake. I think you needed the spongy consistency of boxed cake mix for the shapes to work. The 4 Real Learning forum has lots of ideas if you search under St. Patrick.

I'd love to hear if you all have any ideas or traditions for celebrating and teaching about St. Patrick!