It Started With St. Joseph's Day

St. Joseph's Day, 2019

It all started on St. Joseph’s Day, six years ago.

That was the day that I took my first step into incorporating liturgical living into our family life.  It was a spontaneous act, spurred by the influence and inspiration I was finding in relatively new bloggers who were sharing with the rest of us how they lived the Catholic life at home with their kids. 

I was still a relatively new mom. My oldest child was four years old, and I was toying with the idea of homeschooling because we didn’t have the option of sending our kids to a Catholic school (among other reasons).  But I had no example to follow, no upbringing that incorporated the faith into daily living (aside from grace before meals), and no idea how to make being Catholic something my kids would understand, let alone enjoy.  Raising children in a community where Catholics are the extreme minority made me even more determined to bring our faith into our daily life, and I knew making it fun was imperative.  I didn’t just want our children to know they were Catholics; I wanted them to WANT to be Catholics.  So, I did what I’d done two years before, when I was looking for a community that understood the experience of infertility from a Catholic-perspective. I started searching the blogs for the community that I couldn’t find next door, only this time, I was looking for experienced, devout, Catholic mothers who were teaching the faith in fun ways to their children.

That was in 2014, when blogging was still a “thing” and the blogging community was strong, and networked, and we were all learning from one another in more than 30 second sound-bites. With a little searching, I found blogs like Catholic All Year and Shower of Roses and Catholic Icing, among others. I dove into them, reading post after post, and was blown away by all that they were doing with their kids to live fully the liturgical life. Still, I hesitated, mostly because living liturgically the way those families on the blogs did just seemed so overwhelming and beyond my capabilities. My boys hated crafts and coloring sheets, I did not feel like I had the time to do so many of the things that I saw and admired on the blogs, and I just barely knew the faith myself, yet these blogging mothers were so well catechized.  So, I read about it a lot and did very little.

But the seed had been planted, and the Holy Spirit was watering it in my soul. It was on March 19, 2015 that I remember driving to pick up my two little boys at preschool when the thought suddenly struck me that it was St. Joseph’s Day, a Solemnity no less, and I, once again, was completely ignoring it.  It nagged at me, much as the Holy Spirit does sometimes, and I couldn’t shake the thought that I should at least do something to honor this Patron of our Universal Church and encourage a devotion in my sons to this model of men.  Still, it was already 2 p.m. and I didn’t have time to make or prep anything; however, I did remember reading that it was a tradition to eat cream puffs (zeppoles) on St. Joseph’s Day.  So, with only a few minutes to spare, I drove past my kids’ school, and went a few extra miles to the grocery store, grabbed a packet of eclairs from their bakery shelf, and then rushed back to the school to pick up the kids. It felt a little crazy, and much too unplanned for my comfort, but at least it was something.

When we arrived home, I made dinner, then told the boys that I had a surprise for dessert (since it was Lent, they found this very perplexing).  I cleared the table, put a statue of St. Joseph in the middle of it, unwrapped the eclairs from their cellophane wrapping, and served them on a plastic Disney plate. The boys were ecstatic.  Suddenly, they loved St. Joseph’s Day, and suddenly, I did, too! I snapped a couple of photos and shared them on social media to commemorate our first baby steps into liturgical living.

St. Joseph's Day, 2015

That was the beginning of a new way of learning for my husband, myself, and our kids.  As feast days would approach, I would research them and plan little ways to celebrate them.  And although our children focused mostly on the treats they were receiving, or the fun parts of the day, they also began to associate the activities with various saints, liturgical seasons, feasts, memorials, and solemnities.  But perhaps more importantly, I was learning along with them, and living the kind of life I wish I’d had as a child being raised in the very progressive post-Vatican II church of the 1970s.  In so many ways, sharing the faith with our kids in this way has felt like a second chance for me to learn and experience so much that I missed out on as a Catholic kid.  It has truly been a win-win.

St. Joseph's Day, 2017

This past week, for the sixth year in a row, we celebrated St. Joseph’s Day again.  Six years later though, it has now evolved into an all-day celebration.  Instead of a last-minute trip to the grocery, my son and I cooked in the kitchen together, making our own cream puffs side-by-side. 

St. Joseph's Day, 2021

My husband, a true carnivore who looks forward with great anticipation to Meat Fridays, took off work early so that he could put pork chops on the grill.  My other son, who loves working with wood just as St. Joseph did, worked in the garage on a craft made from pieces of cherry wood that he cut and sanded, turning each piece into a pretty little candle sconce. 

St. Joseph's Day, 2021

We invited a few (non-Catholic) friends over, and our two parish priests, and all sat down to a feast together, telling stories, and predicting whether or not St. Joseph was going to send us some sunshine on what so far, had been a very gray and cloudy day (he did).

As the sun set that evening, we finished up the dishes, swept the floors, lit the candles in our brand-new St. Joseph’s Day sconces, and said our family rosary.  The four-year old, wiped out from a day of non-stop activity and no nap, leaned against his dad and was sound asleep before the second decade.  In the candlelight, our statue of St. Joseph stood illuminated, looking down from the mantle upon our little family.  Later that night, as I kissed my oldest son goodnight, he leaned forward and said, “I wish every day could be like this,” then he drifted off to sleep, no doubt dreaming of cream puffs and the love of St. Joseph, and as he did, I recognized that my dream was already coming true.