Catching Up: Our Lady of Guadalupe Luncheon!

 

We have been enjoying celebrating the feasts of St. Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe the past several years.  We have had a fun luncheon with friends for the past few years, and we did it again this year on December11, two days after Juan Diego's feast day and one day before Our Lady of Guadalupe's feast day.  This year, our friends brought another Catholic homeschooling family to join in the fun!

When everyone arrived, the children colored pictures depicting the story of Our Lady appearing to Juan Diego while listening to the Juan Diego glory Stories audio CD.  Then they watched part of the St. Juan Diego CCC video.  The copy our friends own had gotten damaged, so I found a partial clip on Youtube and the kids watched it through the Roku on the TV while us moms set up the luncheon!

 

We had Aztec hot cocoa (aka Mexican hot chocolate), tortilla tilmas filled with ham roses, sombreros made from Pringles and slices of string cheese...

 

...a guacamole Tepeyac Hill with tortilla chips, a Mexican cheese dip we call "sun dip" to remind us of the "lady who appeared to be clothed with the sun," the "supporting angels" made from fruit leather using a cookie cutter...

 

...crescent moon cookies to represent the crescent Our Lady appeared to be standing on, Dora Star cereal to represent the stars that covered Mary's mantle, and candy cane bishop's croziers.

While the kids ate their meal, I read our new Our :Lady of Guadalupe pop-up book to them all, and we talked about which foods went along with each part of the story.  I didn't get any photos of that... or of them coloring or watching the video... and here, a little segue from this post to say: I used to be disappointed when we did some fun activity and I didn't manage to document the whole thing in photos.  But here is what I have come to accept and embrace: if I am going to be doing activities with my kids, I will not be able to take photos of everything while also helping the event to run smoothly.  I first noticed this at our Epiphany party last year.  If I am going to be able to enjoy talking to the other adults, reading to the children, helping replenish food, and just being able to be relaxed, I am not going to get photos of everything.  And that is okay.  That is okay, because when I look back at my own childhood photos, my parents did not capture it all.  They didn't have a photo of every part of every event.  And that actually helps to add to the mystery of the memories for me!  The photos jog my memory, and I can still wonder if my memory is perfectly accurate or not, I can still relive the childhood events as my memory allows and not as dictated by exact photos of how things really happened.  And I think I like it better that way!  My own kids will look back and see photos that give glimpses and not a more full story as it appeared visually.  Their memories can fill in the rest!

So, with my philosophizing out of the way, we continue...

 

After the meal, the adults helped the kids to follow Our lady's request to build a church in her honor!  Of course, ours was a gingerbread, er, graham cracker, church.  After the moms set up the structure of the building, the kids decorated it... a little too well, as it had to be repaired from some caving in of the roof which was heavy with candies!

 

I think they got the idea that they had to use ALL the candy that was available, ha ha!

 

The completed church... with the help of the leftover royal icing from our St. Nicholas cookies!

Our Lady's image on the tilma, a  miracle which science has not been able to explain (cactus-fiber tilmas always deteriorate after a short time whereas this one has lasted 500 years!), can still be seen in the church that now stands at this site in Mexico.  I love that this little activity can teach our children of these miracles that occur in our beautiful Catholic faith!!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, Pray for Us!

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!

Advent 2011

A few things we did this year during Advent... St. Lucy bread on the 13th!  Chris made the recipe for us the night before so it'd be ready for breakfast.  He's so good at keeping the extra stuff (and the regular stuff!) going while I'm mothering the bitty one. :)  This day will be a fun one to celebrate in the future with our own Lucy!

The girls about to blow out candles on the wreath-shaped bread.

Our Christmas baking this year consisted of non-baked goodies that were easy to assemble: M&M pretzel dots, Christmas bark, and caramel popcorn.  No gingerbread men this year; maybe in 2012...

Cecilia and Caroline helped with the "baking." We always enjoy being able to put work into homemade treats to give as gifts.

The girls frosted a gingerbread house kit for the O Antiphon that begins with "ruler of the house of Israel," like last year.  This kit was particularly helpful in that the house came pre-assembled!

Cecilia adds an ornament to the Jesse Tree.  We enjoyed doing the Holy Heroes Advent Adventure and following Jesus's family tree.

And now that it's Chris's birthday, January 14, maybe I'll actually get around to putting away the Jesse Tree, along with the Christmas cards and other random decor that's out and about our house!

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!

O Antiphons - Days 4, 5, 6, and 7

~O Clavis David (O Key of David) - December 20~

This particular antiphon says, "O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens..."

So, going along with the house imagery, we assembled a gingerbread house on this day! The mention of a key and opening/shutting made us think about the door to a house as well.

I bought this kit on clearance for a couple bucks at Sam's a few days after December 25th last year and saved it... so there was no tasting of the building materials!! Quite frankly, the icing was awful. I don't know if it had gotten old or if it was normally that thick and non-sticky... but once it dried, it held everything very well!

My Girl Scout troop used to make and sell gingerbread houses (from scratch!) at our church bazaar each year, and it was one of my favorite things we did. It will be lots of fun to see the gingerbread house-decorating evolve as the girls get older and able to do more on their own and come up with detailed decorating ideas! (I was known for my "Big Red Roof of Gum" gingerbread houses!)

I thought the directions were hilarious, so I included a photo. They were written by a control freak or something... notice that if a piece of the gingerbread breaks, you are commanded "DO NOT BE DISTRESSED." This photo doesn't show it, but there were also gingerbread ornaments to be decorated and hung on the Christmas tree, and the directions stated specifically in bold type that "once you have placed ornaments on the tree, remember that they are there for decoration only and should not be eaten." I'll be looking out my window for the Gingerbread House Kit Police, then...

The finished house

~O Oriens (O Rising Dawn): December 21~

We went to look at Christmas lights this evening, since the antiphon mentions "brightness of light eternal" and how we await Jesus's coming to "enlighten those who sit in darkness." I made hot chocolate for us to all sip as we drove around different neighborhoods, and the girls love that they get to go in their pajamas! Oh, and did you know that hot liquids aren't supposed to go in sippy cups with valves? I did, but I didn't care. ;-P If you loosen the lid slightly and re-tighten it after taking a small sip, it is less likely to spew everywhere! ;)

Interesting also that this antiphon about light falls on the longest night of the year - knowing the Catholic Church, that was probably intentional!

~O Rex Gentium (O King of the Gentiles): December 22~

"O King of the Gentiles and their desired one, the cornerstone that makes both one: come, and deliver man, whom you formed out of the dust of the earth."

We baked a bunch of banana bread to give as gifts today... cornerstones. They are brick-shaped. Easy enough, huh? This is actually coconut banana bread, which is delicious!!

Here's the "cornerstone" that we ate!

~O Emmanuel: December 23~

"O Emmanuel, God with us, our King and lawgiver, the expected of the nations and their Savior: come to save us, O Lord our God."

Ero Cras: Tomorrow, I come.

We made a birthday cake for baby Jesus today! We'll share it with family on the evening of Christmas Day.

It's an eggnog cake, which has a strange frosting - it's made with granulated sugar, which makes tinting some of the frosting difficult. It's really rich and definitely a once-every-few-years kind of dessert!

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve - no antiphon since the vigil Mass tomorrow is technically the start of the Christmas season!