Ideas for Fun
this Catholic Season
25 days of ADVENT
(Advent ends Christmas Eve - THEN the Christmas Season STARTS)
​The LITURGICAL CALENDAR designates the cyclical celebrations of the Church.
As a Catholic - there's always a Feast Day or reason to celebrate!
The Pie-Chart Style version (below) shows when Advent turns into Christmas, Lent into Easter etc. -
There's a Monthly Calendar Style version, too, which lists SO MUCH MORE than Easter/Christmas...
(find them free at your church, or online):
Liturgical Calendars give a head's up for Saint's Days, Special Days to Celebrate or Attend Mass...
...Certain days to Add Fish to your Grocery List...
What Days to Have a Kid-Parade...Serve Rolls - or Alphabet Soup...Seriously Fun Stuff!
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Ex.: Serve Plain Rolls on St. Joseph's Day, Mar. 19th, Cinnamon Rolls on St. Lucia Day, Dec. 13th (see article below), Alphabet Soup on Saint Days when you want to celebrate Saints that wrote a lot like St. Augustine (or maybe the saint your child is reading about)... etc.​
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Keep Watching This Page for EASY WAYS to Add Joy & Celebration each Season!
Our Lady of Guadalupe
feast day Fri. Dec.12th
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In December in the year 1531, Our Lady appeared to a poor man, (now Saint) Juan Diego in Mexico. She asked him to build a church in her honor. He brought this news to the Archbishop who did not believe him. His final vision of Our Lady sent him back to the Archbishop, with others in the room watching. As Juan Diego opened his cactus fiber cloak called a tilma, Castilian roses spilled to the floor: Out of season for those roses - which did not exist in Mexico anyway, but they grew in the Archbishops home town in another country! 'Gotta love Mother Mary's style!
Today, you can still see St. Juan Diego's tilma with the miraculous image of Our Lady on it, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Modern Science still cannot explain the endless mysteries of this piece of clothing--from why the cactus fibers have not disintegrated in close to 500 years without preservation, to what the colors were made from (science still can't figure it out!), to why, looking at the picture of Mary's eyes under a microscope, you can see the people in the room, from Mary's vantage, as the roses spilled onto the floor. There are so many more details about this true story, and about the tilma image - more than for just a column...! I suppose the most wondrous thing about the fruit of Our Lady of Guadalupe's apparition is that in a short period of time, mi-mi-millions of Mexican's, and through history, countless more everywhere, have become devoted to our Lord within his universal Catholic faith. What more could a mother want!
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A local parish used to process an Our Lady of Guadalupe statue through the neighborhood, ending with a huge party. Is there one in your neighborhood?
Look this one up!! Fascinating - Miraculous - Wow !!
St. Nicholas Day
Saturday, December 6th or whenever...
If your kids are little enough for this - chances are they don't know when St. Nick's feast day is! Pick a December day and share the Joy of Anticipation (...so Advent-ish!) I routinely would forget to "do" this tradition exactly on the 6th - our teen kids have kept the memory of doing this and have no idea of the date mattering...
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St. Nicholas (born in 270) was a real person, and is now a Saint. His wealthy Greek parents died when he was a boy. Young Nicholas grew to become a Catholic Priest - then a Bishop. In those days when a family could not pay a debt, their children might be taken, to work off the money owed - ugh! When Nicholas found out that a widower of three girls was in dire straights, each time, before his daughter's were taken, he would toss a sack of gold (from his inheritance) into their window or chimney. The family would awaken to their good fortune and be able to keep the wolves away. The response was so well-received, that he began to repeat his secret saves... Gifts might land on someone's fireplace hearth, or in their stockings drying near the fireplace (no dryers back then)... and well, the rest of the story is part true history (St. Nicholas was an actual Bishop who actually did this--remember pictures of St. Nicholas used to be him with a long Robe and a Bishops hat), and after 1964, part Coca-Cola Santa, (when St. Nick was made Santa secular) but you get the idea.
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So feel free to create your own family tradition to honor this selfless-saint, but many parts of the world, including many of German decent, have children leave their shoes on the windowsill or fireplace hearth on St. Nicholas' feast day (the day he died), December 6th. Children awaken to them filled with an orange, nuts, and candy chocolate coins. If their shoes are filled with treats, and not coal, the children, (if good :)), can anticipate that St. Nick will leave a gift for them again on the Christ child's birthday as well, the evening of December 24th.
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Frohe Weihnachten!
(Merry Christmas in German)
How do you share faith and traditions
with your family?