A feast day, observed

I share this story today not to give the impression that I think we have an especially "holy" family or anything. I am decidedly average, and really, so are my children. The reason I chose to share this event is to help cement a memory that I hope to hold onto as my children get older. As it is, I love looking at old posts on my own blog and recalling how we lived out our days when they were just babies. I'm sure in three or four years I'll look back on this fondly, now that I have made a record of it.

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 The Feast of Christ the King has always been one of my favourites. I love the music – some of the best hymns are almost always sung at this Mass – and I love that it precedes Advent, my favourite season in the Church calendar. For years I have tried to make it special, in simple ways, for my children, so to communicate the beauty of this feast day, and to create fond memories for them.

This year I was pretty disorganized in the days preceding – I hadn’t organized a craft for the kids to do and we had virtually no ingredients to make a dessert with. Then when I woke up to see that we had had a huge snowfall the night before, I lost the desire to do much of anything. 


It’s not a secret that I really hate winter, and I wanted to throw in the towel for the day, maybe the whole season, at the thought that this snowfall would be the first of months and months of similar weather.

Yet I was determined to do something. After Mass, I tried in vain to make “cookies” with only lard, as we were out of butter, and a mishmash of gluten-free flours that were unidentified in their Bulk Barn bags. They might have turned out, if we hadn’t also been out of eggs, too, which I discovered half-way through the process.

I somehow rectified the disastrous cookie attempt into a cobbled-together version of apple crisp, which everyone miraculously liked. But I still felt pretty defeated by the time we had finished dinner. The whole day had gotten away from me and the wintry weather had made me spiral into a blue funk. I don’t think I had been especially pleasant to be around.

While I was loading the dishwasher, Isaiah ran in and asked me how long I would be. I said, “probably five more minutes?” to which he smiled and excitedly scampered away. When I finished up tidying the kitchen, I discovered that the kids had dressed themselves up, and were carrying a homemade paper crown on a pillow.



They said we were going to go crown Jesus, that is, the statue of the Sacred Heart that sits on our piano in the dining room. They asked me to lead a hymn, so I sang “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and then they led me and their father in a procession to the statue where they placed the crown they had made on Jesus’ head. Then they recited the Our Father. This was completely without prompting or suggestion from me, and I admit to being somewhat dumbfounded.

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 Somehow it seemed so fitting; I spent the day feeling sorry for myself for a variety of reasons, and it was my children who brought meaning and peace to the day. I was too distracted to pull off any real sort of acknowledgement of this feast day, and it was they who led me, both literally and figuratively, into a simple childlike worship of our Lord.

Comments

  1. ElenaNovember 26, 2016 at 10:07 AM

    How wonderful. You are raising wonderful children, especially the fourth one.😉

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jenna CraineDecember 3, 2016 at 4:53 AM

      Yes, the fourth is especially easy to catechize thusfar.

      Delete
  2. ErinDecember 1, 2016 at 4:06 PM

    So sweet! I miss the days of spontaneous processions that always seemed to happen in our house on feast days. The kids seemed to want to make things special, no matter how well (or not) prepared I was. I feel like a bit of lazy domestic church Mama these days, but your story inspires me to try a little harder! These moments are pure gift, when their sweet innocence brings Jesus to us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jenna CraineDecember 3, 2016 at 4:55 AM

      I hope my story inspires you not so much to "try a little harder" but to LOOK a little harder, because a lot of what happens that is beautiful and inspiring in the domestic church takes off without our effort and sometimes without us even noticing.

      Delete

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