Happy Pentecost!

AS we have done in years past, we hung up our doves above the dining room table. The dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, which came to the apostles at Pentecost!

The girls made a windsock this year... red is the liturgical color, so the body of windsock is red. The streamers are yellow with orange tips, symbolizing the tongues of fire which came to rest above the heads of the apostles and Mary. We used the flames shared at Shower of Roses - thanks, Jessica!

Caroline cut out the flames, which had the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit printed on them. Cecilia drew a picture on the windsock... you can sort of see that she drew Mary in blue and a huge dove (on top of Mary) in white.

Caroline also drew this picture. She and Cecilia were pretending to be the apostle John and Mary. They even cut out "tongues of fire" from orange paper and taped them to their foreheads! :)

~Breakfast~

Pentecost is also known as "Whitsunday," meaning "white Sunday." So I made a special white drink, homemade vanilla steamers... like Starbucks sells for a few bucks apiece, but easily made at home! I also considered making white hot chocolate... mmm, the Paula Dean recipe I found for that was made with four cups of heavy cream (as I expected it would be ;)!

The girls drank them out of our white china teacups!

~Dinner~

Our centerpieces: a red candle with yellow dove shapes on it (made from a beeswax candle kit), a few Holy Spirit holy cards, and our paschal candle, lit for the last day of the Easter Season! I suppose we will bring it back out to light when we celebrate Baby 3's baptism, since the paschal candle at church will be lit then in order to light the baptismal candles.

We set the table with our red tablecloth.

Our salad had bell pepper "tongues of fire" in it!

We also had a 12 fruit salad, to represent the 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit. I think there were actually only 10 or 11 fruits... shh, don't tell! ;)

Our doves, soaring above the celebration

I gave the girls tiny red pinwheels to blow... on Pentecost, there was a sound of a mighty rushing wind (which is the reason for the windsock as well).

Here are our cupcakes... we have done this for three years now, and I don't think Caroline would stand for anything different, as it has become a favorite tradition! I first saw this idea on By Sun and Candlelight... the 13 cupcakes represent Mary and the 12 apostles (Mary being the one with blue sprinkles!). The lit candles on each cupcake represent the tongues of fire above each one. They also remind us that Pentecost is a birthday - the birthday of the Church!

So, we sing "Happy Birthday" to the Church...

...and blow out the candles!

These were chocolate chip cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting... yum! They are a recipe in the Deceptively Delicious cookbook - made with pureed yellow squash and pumpkin! Cecilia actually eats most of the cupcake and not just the frosting off th top of these, ha ha!

We finished our Garden of the Good Shepherd Easter calendar! We passed on the Garden Party this week since we were already having our Pentecost celebration. The girls enjoyed the Easter season and will be sad to go back to Ordinary Time, but it will be a nice change for everyone!