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alicegunther
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Dear Friends,
Ash Wednesday is less than a week away--hard to believe as I look around my house and still see a stray Christmas decoration here and there.
One of my fondest homeschooling memories was a Mardi Gras party held at the home of my friend, Eileen. I had never celebrated Mardi Gras before, and did not even know it had any religious significance. Eileen served the traditional pancakes and bacon and helped the children make Mardi Gras masks. My two eldest were only about four and three at the time, but they were able to make lovely masks, complete with feathers, glitter, and other baubles. (We still have these, by the way.) This was one of my first events with homeschoolers, and I was hooked. I loved the fun craft, the polite and cheerful children, the like-minded mothers, the feeling of camaraderie, and the beauty of sharing our faith in the home.
Do any of you celebrate Mardi Gras? How do you observe Lent in your home?
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Love, Alice
mother of seven!
      
Cottage Blessings
Brew yourself a cup of tea, and come for a visit!
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Elizabeth
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Well, Alice, Megan and I had a great Mardi Gras party planned fo rour parish but it was canceled due to an incompetent administrator  So...it's back to the standard party at home. We usually make Belgian waffles with strwberries and whipped cream AND ice cream sundaes. This year, we'll have mardi gras beads enough for an entire parish  I really emphasize the fact that we feast and then we fast. I purge the refrigerator and try to borrow the atmosphere of our Serbian orthodox friends who institute a much more old-fashioned fast..I'm thinking about doing the purple drapes over religious pictures and statues this year, maybe just wide purple ribbons.
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Elizabeth Foss is no longer a member of this forum. Discussions now reflect the current management & are not necessarily expressions of her book, *Real Learning*, her current work, or her philosophy. (posted by E. Foss, Jan 2011)
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alicegunther
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I host Little Flowers/Boys Club at my home, but we usually go on hiatus during the winter. Most years, we resume with a party for St. Patrick's or St. Joseph's day. For this reason, I have never hosted a Mardi Gras party, although perhaps I will try to have waffles and strawberries for my own family this year.
Purple ribbons on the statues and pictures would be a good Lenten reminder for all of us. We also have a large crown of thorns we hang in the family room as a constant reminder of the penitential nature of the season. This year, I am hoping to hang homemade Stations of the Cross around our property, so that we can say the stations together several days a week. I'm planning a trip to the craft store this weekend and hope these stations will be simple, but reusable for next year. One year, I was looking for a craft project to do with the Little Flowers during Lent. At that time, we had only fifteen members, and it struck me that we could make individual stations. I purchased decorative wooden garden stakes in the shape of hearts, paints, and holy cards representing the individual stations, including the Resurrection. When the girls were finished with their crafts, we arranged the stations around the backyard and said the stations together. It was beautiful to see how reverently each little girl led her own station.
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Love, Alice
mother of seven!
Cottage Blessings
Brew yourself a cup of tea, and come for a visit!
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cathhomeschool
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We are going to our first Mardi Gras party this Saturday. It is for adults (bunko party), so I think that on Fat Tuesday we will celebrate at home with the kids -- as Elizabeth said -- pancake supper plus purging leftover ice-cream and chocolate syrup and Cuban Christmas sweets from the fridge.
Last year for Lent we wove a crown of thorns from young elm tree branches (still very pliable) and then inserted toothpicks for thorns. We had this as the center-piece on the dining room table with a clay saucer of ashes in the middle. We pulled out "thorns" as we made sacrifices. We will do this again this year. I also plan on decorating with purple fabric on our mantle around a cross and statues of St. Therese and Mary. Above the mantle are hung large framed pictures of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart. I'll hang purple ribbon around them. These should all be noticeable reminders of the season. One year (I'd like to repeat this year) we hung 8x10 pictures of the stations (beautifully sweet - from CHC catalog) around a room and once a week in the evening would turn out all lights and say the stations by flashlight. The children took turns focusing the light on the proper station. I would also like for us to write on slips of paper what we're "giving up" and what we're "taking on" for Lent. I want to place these with our table centerpiece -- maybe in a saucer or laid under the crown of thorns or something.
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Janette (4 boys - 22, 21, 15, 14)
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Elizabeth
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Alice, we have a life-sized cross that we use for a living stations with the children every year. You could gather that Little Flowers/Boys club sometime during Holy Week to do that. It makes a huge impression on my children.
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Elizabeth Foss is no longer a member of this forum. Discussions now reflect the current management & are not necessarily expressions of her book, *Real Learning*, her current work, or her philosophy. (posted by E. Foss, Jan 2011)
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TKCAnne
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Yes, we do celebrate Mardi Gras. We usually have red beans and rice and this year I made a King Cake. It is basically cinnamon roll dough baked in a ring shape. You glaze it with powdered sugar and lemon juice and sprinkle purple, green, and gold sugar on top. Inside it you hide a small plastic baby. These are served from Epiphany through Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You cut it up and everybody looks for the baby in their piece (like the Magi were looking for *the* baby!)
The year that Taran was born, we had a big Mardi Gras party with our Rosary group after his Baptism. It was potluck and everyone brough delicious Cajun/Creole food. The kids made masks and we played Cajun music. And we prayed the Rosary, of course.
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Kelly
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We talk a lot in our house about the "first we feast, then we purge" motif that someone on this board mentioned before :-) To that end, Mardi Gras is certainly illustrative of the "feast" part! This year we had a combination Mardi Gras party/Birthday Party for one of our children, tho it was really more of a family party. We had loads of beads and inexpensive masks, decorated the house with drapes of purple, green and gold, put plastic alligators on all the tables (not very penitential, I know, but certainly Cajun) and played lots of Zydeco & Cajun music while we ate Jambalaya and adults drank Hurricanes (in moderation). As it turns out, we have a neighbor who is, of all things, a fire eater and a stilt walker, so he came and entertained us with his tricks, as well as a friend who brought his 6-foot boa constrictor. Last but not least, out came the King Cake. There are many recipes for King Cake on the internet, we just had the traditional sugar and cinnamon type, with the baby inside...oh, and Mardi Gras MOONPIES (it's a Southern thing). It was a great time, and as Maria von Trapp pointed out in her wonderful book, "Through the Year with the Von Trapp Family", its excess was an excellent counterpoint to the
austerity of Lent that began the next day.
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4Real Forums : Domestic Church
Topic: Mardi Gras and Lent
