My boys

Our little one has decided to get an early start and is joining the crocodile hunter in his algebra studies.

Happy St. Brigid Day!

This year we are having company over tomorrow, and I have spent the past week working through a major cleaning/decluttering project that was started when I was pregnant, so we didn't have a get together for St. Brigid's feast day the way we usually do.

I have been spending a lot of time planning ideas for our year though, so while we didn't use any of these this year, I thought I would post my ideas and plans and we will look forward to implementing some of these next year!

Pantry Cleaning:  I typically clean out my pantry on St. Brigid day.  Since she was known for her generous pantry and willingness to always offer food to those in need, her icon hangs at our pantry.  This is a great day to go through and declutter the pantry, clean jars, refill stores of food, take stock of what is needed, and remove any items that need to be discarded.

Food Pantry Donations:  During all of that cleaning and organizing is a great time to find items to donate to a local food pantry program.  Doing this with the kids is a great reminder that we live in abundance and that many do not have a pantry of food to go to when they are hungry.

Tea with friends:  Always a favorite in our house, we often invite friends to come celebrate with us.  We have made fresh butter, baked Irish Soda bread, and created St. Brigid Crosses together.

Read The Life of St. Brigid:  One of my favorite Orthodox children's books!  

Set a seasonal table:  We have recently moved ours into the kitchen where it is more visible throughout the day.  I found a small wooden shelf that fits nicely into a small space in the kitchen and we are really enjoying it.

The small vial in front of the icon contains water from a Brigid Well brought back by my in-laws when they travelled to Ireland, as well as the cross.  We borrowed the icon and cross from the pantry temporarily.

We also got a festivity stand this year, which I am loving!  I have always enjoyed Mat. Emily's posts featuring a stand like this, and this year got one for Christmas.  The girls have taken over the role of setting it up for most feasts and seasons and they have a lot of fun digging through the various wooden animals to locate things relating to the life of a saint.  Letting them set it has been a great way for them to remember what they already know about each saint.  

Baptism

Hard to believe our little one is already 4 months old.  Here is a look at the baptism, which was at the end of October, but I thought was appropriate to share as we celebrate the feast of Theophany this week.

The new icons in our temple!  Dmitry Shkolnik  and a crew of 3 other iconographers, 2 flown in from Russia, came and spent a month at our parish creating these icons.  They were completed the week before I was churched - so I left with a sanctuary of blank white walls, and returned to this!

            

The table overlays were unbleached cotton muslin from Hobby L*bby, very inexpensive, but has the look of raw linen.  Since it was fall,  I used a lot of white pumpkins to decorate, but didn't go with a complete fall color scheme since I still wanted to enjoy the pastels of a little one!  Instead, I used a lot of  white with milk glass vases on each table and beautiful blues for the flowers.

Buttermilk spice cake iced with cream cheese frosting, yum!!!  I decorated the cake with gumpaste sugar roses and hydrangea.  The roses were some I made years ago when experimenting with new techniques for realistic sugar flowers.  I also had hydrangea left over from my brother-in-law's wedding cake, and I made a handful of new ones to fill in.  Hydrangea are my favorite flower, and I love them in sugar almost as much as live ones.

I also made pumpkin pies in a jar, a quick uncooked version of this seasonal favorite.  These were a huge hit, and the best thing is, you can make them up ahead and they store wonderfully!  I put them in the mini mason jam jars, and stored them with the lids on in the refrigerator.

Loved this take home gift idea, honey from Holy Cross Monastery, in jars from Betterbee (it appears they no longer carry the 4 oz size).

 

Jordan almonds are a baptismal tradition for us as well, so the kids helped me stamp muslin bags with a blue cross design, and we filled them with blue and white Jordan almonds as favors.

Cider punch served from the glass jars I usually store my pasta in, and jam jars from the pantry for glasses.

Menu:

selection of cheeses and fruits, cheese phyllo triangles, proscuitto and phyllo wrapped asparagus, stuffed mushrooms,   stuffed pumpkin, mini quiche, individual pot pies, stuffed eggs, Captain R*dney's cheese bake, corn dip, fall salad with pumpkin seed oil vinaigrette

For the little ones, we rolled brown butcher paper across the children's tables and taped it in place.  Twig styled colored pencils were placed along the length of the table.   The kids had a great time coloring on the paper while they ate!

Pinterest Inspiration Page 

I hope you all had a merry Christmas and blessed Theophany!  My blogging is a bit sporadic these days, but life is full and I thank God for that.

Wicked Sense of Humor Required......

If you find the Elf on the Sh*lf phenomenon a bit annoying, or you just enjoy torturing your husband, you need to go check out a blog I recently ran across.    The run down is a wife found her husband's weakness, a dislike/fear of those creepy little elves to whom entire websites and pinterest boards are dedicated.  She is blogging her adventures with her own version of the elf.  Is there something wrong with me?  Because I laughed until I cried.  I guess I have a warped sense of humor.

The Adventures of Bobbum the Creepy Elf

and while I don't think this would phase my husband one bit (though perhaps a creepy Rud*lph might?)........

.....if you are in the market for a creepy elf, it appears eb*y is flush with them!

Jesse Tree

Just as every liturgy is both the same and yet different, I love how our festal celebrations each year are the same, yet different.  Each year that we come to a feast, we are different people, our family dynamics change as we grow from a house full of little ones to a house ranging from teenagers to newborns.  It is also beautiful to see how traditions hold up even as they evolve.  Advent has always been a time of deep traditions, and each year I love preparing with the children.  The readings for the Jesse Tree have been a part of our evening time together for many years now, though each year it takes on a new feel.

Most of our ornaments come from a swap on the Festal Celebrations board.  A few have been replaced over time with new ones created by friends in our parish.  We have played with hanging them on an ornamental tree I found at a local florist, and some years we have just hung them directly onto the Christmas tree each day.

This year, while shopping for furniture for the atrium I ran across a small bedside table.  I bought it planning to use it at church, but when I brought it home I realized it made a perfect little stand for a Jesse Tree.  I have always struggled with having a place for a Jesse Tree, one where it was visible and part of our daily life, but not in the way of meals and daily living.  This piece was perfect and fit nicely in front of a window in the living room.  We topped the table with an extra red table runner from the altar cloths, and the children went hunting for branches.  We filled a metal vase from (my favorite store) H*bby Lobby with rocks to stabilize it and arranged the branches.


The table has a drawer to hold our readings and matches for lighting the votives, and there is a place underneath the drawer which houses a box filled with all of our ornaments.

Our readings have changed over the years as well.  We began using readings from an old Orthodox publication, then used the ones created for our swap.

A few years ago, the Queen's godfather began sending us a set of readings he was writing.  They were still in the editing stages, and each day I printed them off for us to use.  Then this year he presented us with the finished version, a beautifully bound copy, complete with icon illustrations.   All dedicated to the Queen  :)  So now, we have our own meaningful set of readings, compiled with love by a very special friend.

It is easy to fall into worrying about having everything just perfect, celebrating or honoring a particular feast in a certain way.  It is good to step back and realize that life changes, and while the Church is always there, and always the same, she is made up of us, the living body of Christ, and therefore is not static.  As our small "t" traditions develop, it is beautiful to see how they grow, change and root themselves in our lives.  And while consistency is important with children, flexibility is as well.  I am trying to focus on being consistent with the things that really matter, such as devoting time to read these precious scriptures which take us on a grand journey through the history of salvation; remaining flexible with the smaller details.  The message I want my children to take away from our time together in Advent is that no moment in the history of this world was more important than that moment of the Incarnation.  And in the Orthodox understanding of the great feasts of the church, I want them to enter into the joy of that Incarnation each year with a sense of both newness and familiarity.  Each of these feasts is like an old friend.  We have travelled this road before, we recall favorite readings, traditions, moments.  But each year is also new again.  And each year we do not just commemorate and remember the Incarnation.  Through the great mystery of the Divine Liturgy and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, we are transported to that moment - chronos time ceases to exist (though some may disagree after standing through a Paschal liturgy!), instead we immerse ourselves in kairos.  How glorious to be able to enter into the Incarnation, to not just recall the greatest gift given to man, but to actually be present in that moment!

Milestone

After nearly 5 years of hard work, a grueling physical exam that left him faint and a kata exam critiqued by 6 regional black belts, the crocodile hunter earned his black belt in Wado Ryu Karate.