I've been so torn lately over holding on to traditions I grew up with. My favorite holiday is coming up - May Day. I know there are many other holidays before May Day, but I enjoy it so much I'm already anticipating and planning how we will celebrate. May Day lands on a Sunday this year, and I was thinking about throwing a May Day Fesitival, with a May pole and everything! While I don't exactly remember the origin of the holiday, I know it was pagan. As the pagan holidays revolved around the seasons, it is half-way between the spring equinox and the summer equinox. Again, while I don't remember the traditions or reasoning behind them, I know this is another holiday that Christians adopted and came up with their own symbolism for. In some cases, like Christmas and Easter, I think this was done in an effort to convert pagans. They were already celebrating, so the church would use these rituals to turn them towards the church. But I wonder if in some cases, (and perhaps truly in all) this was actually just a way to let Christians join in on the fun. I've been trying to decide if that's ok or not.
A plan has taken shape for our observance of Lent and Easter. Recently Acorn's most requested book has been "Ten Apples Up On Top." Half way through the book they declare, "Eight! Eight! And we can skate. Look now! We can skate with eight!" Thus began Acorn's obsession with roller skates. Over and over he would tell us, "I would like to skate." So I started looked for a pair of adjustable, over-the-shoe skates. When I found them on a resale site he wouldn't stop bugging me about when we were going to go get them. None of my explanations about waiting for a response from the seller mattered. But when I sympathized that it can be really hard to wait, I remembered the children's sermon from a couple of weeks ago in which the pastor talked about Lent and how it could be hard to control ourselves when there's something we really want.
I've been trying to figure out whether or not we were going to do Easter baskets. I'm still not totally sold on the idea. I still want to look up the origin of the tradition, but I definitely have some ideas of what I would put in an Easter basket. So for now, here's my plan. Brain storming...Do you do Easter baskets? My husband and I got them as kids, but haven't done them for our children yet. My oldest is 4, so he's starting to learn more about how other families celebrate and understands what's going on more. In our church, we talk about how mainstream "Easter" symbols remind us of what we are celebrating at Easter. We have an egg cracking custom to symbolize the tomb being open. We talk about how the colors of eggs remind us of God's different gifts. Some years we explain how butterflies are a symbol of Jesus's resurrection.
In thinking about why we do Easter baskets, the only thing I could come up with was to create an analogy to the excitement that the women and men must have felt when they found Jesus's tomb empty. So I was thinking about doing an Easter basket this year that incorporates that idea. I want to set up a "tomb," close it on Friday, and have them find it open with gifts inside on Sunday. I feel like we should put something in there when we close it. Any ideas? Is this a horrible idea all together? I was picking up garbage in our bedroom yesterday when I came across one of Pastor Michelle's Musings. Michelle was the pastor of my church a little while ago, and often included some of her musings in our weekly church bulletin. This one really struck home for me. I have lots of friends on both sides of the issues. I often see posts, not just disagreeing with, but bashing people on the other side. Thankfully these seem to have slowed down lately, but I still am a little uncomfortable in the company of people that have done the bashing. So with Pastor Michelle's permission, I wanted to share her musing here...
|
Categories
All
HeatherStay-at-home Mom Archives
February 2016
Blogs I follow (Does it count as following if I have 50 unread posts sitting in my RSS feed?) when I have time:
A Montessori Home Ali's Art Adventures At Home with Montessori Feeding the Soil How We Montessori Janet Lansbury Jo Cessna Jordan Bagwill Eusebio Montessori ici Multilingual Living Nature Moms Our Best Bites Simply Natural Mom Three Chord Me Under the Sycamore Vibrant Wanderings |