Celebrating St. Nicholas Day

Saint Nicholas Day was on December 6th, and as usual, the children put out their shoes by the fireplace... in the morning, they found some new books about December saints as well as a couple Christmas books, an Advent CD to listen to, and chocolate coins, oranges, and holy cards!

 

Lucy was thrilled that she got chocolate coins this year!  Just a few, but enough to make her feel like she is one of the big girls, or "biggurs," as she says it!

 

 

 

Here is our Saint Nicholas day coffee cake.  It has been a candy cane in the past to look like a bishop's crozier... and since yeast bread is hard to shape into anything and we'd had only moderate luck with the crozier still looking slightly crozier-ish after rising, I thought we would try making the bread look like a bishop's miter (his pointed hat) this year.  Again, the rising did it in... it gets rounded instead of having pointed corners as it did when I first shaped it.  And after putting the cross-shaped dough over the filling, I wanted to cover the rest of the filling with strips of the remaining dough.  So instead of looking like a miter, it looks like a trilobite.  Oh well, the kids believed it was a miter when I told them it was - they don't care!  And if the bread rises to the point that it no longer looks right - well, at least we know it was good bread!

 

Cecilia and Caroline show off their St. Nicholas crafts we made that morning before heading to noon Mass and our homeschool group afterwards... as you can see, Lucy was much more interested in eating the St. Nicholas cookies!

As we have done for the past several years, we made our traditional St. Nicholas cookies and bagged them up for friends and neighbors with little tags that said, "Happy St. Nicholas Day!  St. Nicholas was a bishop who lived in the fourth century.  Just as he did things secretly for others, these treats are left in secret for you!"  We spent time on this day reading our various St. Nicholas books, singing some songs, and watching the cartoon St. Nicholas movie with our homeschool group!

St. Nicholas, Pray for Us!

St. Nicholas Day 2011

Yes, it happened over a month ago, but I am finally recording it here... new baby laziness syndrome going on here. ;)  I want to try to catch up a bit....

So, St. Nicholas Day was on December 6th.  The girls set their shoes out the night before, and in the morning they were found filled with goodies!  

This year, the shoes contained walnuts, holy cards (St. Andrew is visible - his feast day typically falls right at the beginning of Advent), and St. Nicholas chocolate coins to represent the story of Nicholas tossing gold coins into the home of  poor family.

Cecilia was excited about the chocolate!  St. Nicholas also left two new books for Advent, plus a box of candy cane Joe Joe's, which are apparently a much-coveted product at Trader Joe's as soon as they hit the shelves each year... my mom and I were buying them and another customer said, "Oh, you'd better get another box of those - they're so good and will be eaten quickly, and when you come back in a week, Trader Joe's will be sold out already!"  This man and his son were each carrying a box or two of the cookies.  My mom said that  they must be good since she just saw a lady with four boxes in the next aisle.  The man said, "That's my wife."  

I just bought one box.  Probably a good thing since the 2/5 of pregnancy weight I had lost hasn't budged any further (and in fact got worse over Christmas with all the yummy eating).

We have had a fancier breakfast on this day in the past few tears to set it apart as special.  Well, I wasn't up to preparing the candy cane shaped sweet bread this year, so my incredible husband did it!!  Caroline was really excited, since she remembers this bread from years past and enjoyed having it as our little family tradition.

enjoying her St. Nicholas breakfast!

Oh, and this was the evening before... we had our St. Nicholas pork and apples dinner, again in part thanks to my hubby, who cooked the meat so I wouldn't spatter grease on the little slingling.  

During the day, Caroline did some St. Nicholas copywork, we read St. Nicholas books and sang songs about him, and the girls made this fun set of paper figures that I printed from St. Nicholas Center.  

In the afternoon, we were invited by my sweet friend to come over to make St. Nicholas cookies!  Making cookies has been fun for us in the past years, but all that dough-rolling and icing-piping didn't sound very easy for me to manage with a baby.  So what a treat for them to have all the dough made and everything ready at their house!  The girls and I still got to help without the stress I would have faced trying to do it on my own.  And yes, my husband probably would have taken on the cookies too, but this way he didn't have to, and we got to still take part in the cookie tradition.

Yum!!  I just love this recipe!

and so does Cecilia, apparently!

St. Nicholas, pray for us!