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The Church Calendar, Holy days, and Traditions

The Church Calendar, Holy days, and Traditions

Last updated on: November 2, 2010 at 4:10 pm by Melissa

The Church Calendar, Holy days, and Traditions 2010-11-02T16:10:00-06:00 Melissa

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Growing up, we celebrated New Years Day, The 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and through a weird quirk of bloodlines St. Patricks Day. Any other holiday or holy day was not celebrated at all. Valentines day was silly, Palm Sunday and and Easter were considered “pagan” by my Dad, Halloween was evil and avoided completely.

The only holidays that felt remotely religious in my childhood would have been Thanksgiving (we always read about how the pilgrims had escaped religious tyranny in the old world) and Christmas, when we set up the creche and read the Luke account of Jesus birth. We did not have a Christmas tree until the year I was 10, and even for a few years after that my Dad would talk seriously about how Christmas was just as pagan as Easter and we should stop celebrating it as well. Fortunately, my mother loved Christmas, and she won that battle. St. Patricks day was purely about wearing green and eating Irish food, since we had quite a bit of Irish blood. My grandma would usually say something about St Patrick (which was kind of ironic, considering she had left the Catholic Church) but it was not a religious holiday in my understanding.

One of the things I love about the Catholic Church is the richness of the Church calendar. So many holy days, so many hands-on traditions to pass along the faith. So many ways to make religious practice simple and inescapable.

I was reading about the month of November today, and I was so excited to read about the little feast days and traditions that can be incorporated into daily life. The list is endless, but here is one example. St. Martin’s feast day is traditionally November 11th. It celebrates St Martin of Tours who once gave his coat to a beggar and then later dreamt of Jesus wearing the coat and saying “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me”. St Martin went on to become a monk and is now considered the patron saint of beggars.

There are a variety of ways this feast day was traditionally commemorated, eating specific foods, slaughtering an animal and sprinkling the blood on the four corners of your house, and children marching through the streets with lanterns indicating the power of light over darkness. But one of the interesting ideas I read about today, is to give away all the serviceable but extra clothing in your home to homeless shelters, much in the same way St Martin gave away his coat. Why not? I more often than not forget to sort through the boxes of extra clothing people have given us and actually get it out to someone else who needs it. And what an opportunity to teach our children about serving and caring for people who do not have everything that we have?

Simple, built into the calendar, memorable.

I’ve been suprised by how many feast days and holiday’s like this have been forgotten or changed beyond recognition. Take St Stephen’s day or “Boxing Day”. St Stephen was a Deacon in the early Church and is considered the first martyr. Since the work of a Deacon is caring for the poor and widowed, St Stephen’s day or “Boxing Day” (the 26th of December) was the day you gave away boxes of the plenty from your own Christmas to the people less fortunate than yourself. How ironic that today in Canada, Boxing Day is now a day of consummerism and shopping, much like black friday in the states.

Today is All Souls Day. Traditionally, people go to visit the graves of loved ones. I could not go to visit the grave of my Grandpa today, but I could light a candle and say a prayer for him. A European custom was for the poor to go door to door “souling” or offering prayers for the departed loved ones of that house in exchange for food or alms. A soul cake is a kind of blending of food and alms, since it was a sweet cake with a penny baked inside. Soul cakes were also made to be on hand to feed any spirits that came back to visit, as well as being said to free a soul from purgatory every time one was eaten. Fascinating.

So, since we had time, we made Soul Cakes:

Soul Cakes:

1 stick of butter

1cup sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

4 cups flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon allspice

1/2 currents or raisins

1/2 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 350.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Add vanilla and mix well.sift flour and spices together and then add to the butter mixture. Stir in the currants and milk to make a soft dough. Form the dough into flat cakes and place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

First we wrapped up the coins in tin foil.

Then we hid a coin inside each cake.

And they were ready to bake.

They smelled deliciously spicy coming out of the oven! They tasted pretty yummy too, kind of like a giant cookie. And there you go, a little tradition/custom that we were able to do easily in our own home.

And lest any of you feel overwhelmed or sub-par, I was in my pajama’s while we baked. The living room floor looked like this (yes, that is a chunk of bread on the floor next to the diaper):

And my kitchen counters looked like this:

Clearly I do not have it all together! But I look forward to weaving new traditions into family life. Picking the ones that speak most clearly to me, that are most do-able for me, and celebrating every chance I get to point my children back to God in simple, practical, hands-on ways.

Customs are memorable. Joy is memorable. Food is memorable.

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