This is great, Dixie! Written in a way to minimize guilt and inspire creativity. When we were raising our family of 7 we would have the child’s godparents over for a meal with gifts and we would honor the child for ways we saw them being Christ like. It was a lot of work! Especially when we also celebrated their birthdays with a meal with grandparents and gifts. Your simple celebrations seem to be producing good fruit with less stress.
That sounds like such a lovely way of celebrating! It ounds wonderful...but yes, probably a lot of work and coordinating! It's funny, with major holidays my kids really care about every little tradition but somehow with the family feast days they "get" that it's relative. That is, they can ask me for a triple-decker-homemade-black-forest-cake for dessert and lobster for dinner and I can say, "well, that might be too hard for today but you could ask for it for your birthday, maybe," and they get that and will say, "okay, how about ice cream for dessert and lemon chicken for dinner?" and that will be great!
I love your tradition of noting the ways that the child is Christ-like. We did something new this Thanksgiving that worked great that I have been thinking about trying out on a baptismal anniversary: rapid-fire gratitude. We went around the table and each said the first thing that popped into our minds for which we were grateful, all at top speed. We did three or four rounds and it was so fun and not awkward like the "now everyone say one thing you're thankful for" has often been. I'm thinking of doing "rapid fire gratitude for the person we're celebrating." We'll see!
My dad always made a point of wishing me a happy "Mary Day" growing up on the occasion of any prominent Marian feast –which I found ironic since my parents called me by my middle name [not Mary] since birth, but now I feel like it established a sort of liturgical rhythm for my childhood that I only recently became aware of. As the wife of a protestant, I often contemplate what family liturgies we can celebrate that honor our shared traditions as well as the unique differences upon which our household is founded.
Your reflection also has me contemplating how wedding anniversaries are firmly entrenched in secular culture as the realm of hallmark cards, expensive gifts, and iconic I Love Lucy episodes, but for Catholics are a profoundly liturgical event–celebrating the anniversary of a sacrament that is being lived out every day. Perhaps if we treated wedding anniversaries more liturgically there would be fewer laments of the husband's forgetfulness and more turning marriages toward the sacred. Just some midnight musings!
That is a really nice reflection on how that little "Happy Mary Day" throughout the year gave a liturgical rhythm to your childhood. And as you say, yes, family liturgies are such a good place ot honor your unique family faith culture but still in a way connected to the church. I'd love to hear some of the things you do or are thinking of trying!
I hear you about wedding anniversaries! When we got married, Chris and I really tried to focus our efforts on the wedding Mass itself and it was very centering. We also spent a lot of time talking through things about our past lives, desires, etc. together (we set aside a time for this once a week while we were engaged) as a sort of DIY marriage prep that really helped u prepare spiritually and emotionally for marriage.
We didn't really agonize over decisions about the reception or the dress or stuff like that because the desire for perfection and performance there had been mostly removed. (I mean, we still had a great reception, but I didn't have a mental breakdown over choosing just the right color for the tablecloths!) I think it served us well in terms of our own personalities and it's been good for us longterm in setting up the mood of our marriage.
I do love fancy parties and appreciate attention to detail, and I love a nice gift! But these are the trappings...I dunno, there's something here about keeping these things in their proper places as ways of pointing toward the great spiritual, relational, etc. good of the thing or person we are celebrating. It's when it gets turned backwards that it is a problem.
Hurray! Be sure to make it easy and fun for yourselves, not just for the kids. (And please tell me what ideas the two of you come up with, or I will die of curiosity!)
My grandmother became a Jehovah’s Witness late in life. My father said she did it to avoid having to buy gifts for her grandkids on holidays. I’m not sure but Grandma said the JW’s were allowed to have “Happy Days.” Grandma always seemed to have one (strangely) a few days before her birthday. She’d buy herself a bunch of gifts 🤭
Well shoot, I'm Catholic so I'm gonna go ahead and have my standard birthday celebration AND my Happy Days. Presents all around! More presents, please!!
I'm Catholic too. One year my gma was living with us at Christmas. My father LOVED buying tons of gifts for his kids and we were opening them and having a great time. My gma insisted on living in the basement apartment, but she came up during this and announced that magically for her happy day (which fell on Christmas this year) she had bought herself a new car!
This is so much fun! Thanks for sharing this with me, Dixie.
No to get all emotional, but I needed to read this. I needed this reminder that all this liturgical living and seeking the Truth is pointed at joy in Christ. Not alway happiness necessarily, but ways to find simple joy and to remind us all that we’re loved.
I’ll be thinking on what my wife and I can add to our home.
I'm glad if it was a helpful reminder, Derek. That's what these family feast days are to me -- little interruptions that remind me that this is the good life, that I'm living with these blessings right now.
I'll be interested to hear if you and your wife decide to add anything!
This a very good idea! (Especially for low church folks like myself who lack feast days naturally built into their church calendar.) I love the low-key celebratory theme here along with the personalization which makes it meaningful rather than burdensome. Thank you for suggesting it.
Also, your image captions are hysterical. ;) It reminds me of the Trader Joe's captions on their ads and paper bags. I love that sort of thing.
I don't know if you observe Lent, Abigail, but that i a time when these little feast day breaks are especially nice! And every Sunday is a feast day, of course!
I loved reading this! We have a few special-in-the-midst-of-the-ordinary days that we commemorate (the date of each of my sons' adoption finalizations, the first day of school breakfast, etc) and I hadn't really considered what makes them so much more meaningful and enjoyable than our other holidays and feasts until I read your words here. I think it's because they are not something observed in my broader community or culture (or shared with anyone outside my house, for that matter) and I therefore feel free to just be present and not perform or accomplish these commemorations in any way. Thank you for articulating this! I hope that after reading this, many readers will observe special days in the life of their families and reap the joy you talk about here.
Thank you, Susie! I was actually thinking about adoption anniversary observances when I was writing this; we are not an adoptive family but it came to mind as a potential example. Writing this all out helped me understand better why these small feast days work for us and why they are such a net positive, too!
I liked what another commenter said about even just having her dad wish her happy feast day a few times a year gave an extra dose of special rhythm to her childhood. I wonder if there's something about having the habit of noting these days that brings us back to the remembering to appreciate and rejoice in each other and our blessings, kind of like how having habits of prayer help ground us in the day or the week.
I love this so much and I love how inclusive you are. I can see how special these feast days would be for those with religious faith and it's wonderful to see how I can translate that into my non-religious family. Thank you for a lovely and inspiring piece!
Thank you, Genevieve! Yes, absolutely! I think things that are somehow connected to the rhythms of the year are especially good; I knew a family that did something like this for half-birthdays, for example, and I know others who mark the first day of spring, summer, fall, winter...
We celebrate name days and baptismal days too. I used to feel like I needed to make a special meal and dessert from scratch, but with four kids it got to be a lot (on top of the birthdays!) So now they get to pick out a store bought dessert on those days. Even if it’s a very busy day, it’s easy to run into a store and pick up ice cream or whatever, and the kids are thrilled!
I used to do a lot more for those days, too, until I wised up and realized that it being a little fun and a little special was all that was really needed. Thank goodness for the wisdom (or is it humility?!) that comes with experience, right?
This is great, Dixie! Written in a way to minimize guilt and inspire creativity. When we were raising our family of 7 we would have the child’s godparents over for a meal with gifts and we would honor the child for ways we saw them being Christ like. It was a lot of work! Especially when we also celebrated their birthdays with a meal with grandparents and gifts. Your simple celebrations seem to be producing good fruit with less stress.
That sounds like such a lovely way of celebrating! It ounds wonderful...but yes, probably a lot of work and coordinating! It's funny, with major holidays my kids really care about every little tradition but somehow with the family feast days they "get" that it's relative. That is, they can ask me for a triple-decker-homemade-black-forest-cake for dessert and lobster for dinner and I can say, "well, that might be too hard for today but you could ask for it for your birthday, maybe," and they get that and will say, "okay, how about ice cream for dessert and lemon chicken for dinner?" and that will be great!
I love your tradition of noting the ways that the child is Christ-like. We did something new this Thanksgiving that worked great that I have been thinking about trying out on a baptismal anniversary: rapid-fire gratitude. We went around the table and each said the first thing that popped into our minds for which we were grateful, all at top speed. We did three or four rounds and it was so fun and not awkward like the "now everyone say one thing you're thankful for" has often been. I'm thinking of doing "rapid fire gratitude for the person we're celebrating." We'll see!
My dad always made a point of wishing me a happy "Mary Day" growing up on the occasion of any prominent Marian feast –which I found ironic since my parents called me by my middle name [not Mary] since birth, but now I feel like it established a sort of liturgical rhythm for my childhood that I only recently became aware of. As the wife of a protestant, I often contemplate what family liturgies we can celebrate that honor our shared traditions as well as the unique differences upon which our household is founded.
Your reflection also has me contemplating how wedding anniversaries are firmly entrenched in secular culture as the realm of hallmark cards, expensive gifts, and iconic I Love Lucy episodes, but for Catholics are a profoundly liturgical event–celebrating the anniversary of a sacrament that is being lived out every day. Perhaps if we treated wedding anniversaries more liturgically there would be fewer laments of the husband's forgetfulness and more turning marriages toward the sacred. Just some midnight musings!
That is a really nice reflection on how that little "Happy Mary Day" throughout the year gave a liturgical rhythm to your childhood. And as you say, yes, family liturgies are such a good place ot honor your unique family faith culture but still in a way connected to the church. I'd love to hear some of the things you do or are thinking of trying!
I hear you about wedding anniversaries! When we got married, Chris and I really tried to focus our efforts on the wedding Mass itself and it was very centering. We also spent a lot of time talking through things about our past lives, desires, etc. together (we set aside a time for this once a week while we were engaged) as a sort of DIY marriage prep that really helped u prepare spiritually and emotionally for marriage.
We didn't really agonize over decisions about the reception or the dress or stuff like that because the desire for perfection and performance there had been mostly removed. (I mean, we still had a great reception, but I didn't have a mental breakdown over choosing just the right color for the tablecloths!) I think it served us well in terms of our own personalities and it's been good for us longterm in setting up the mood of our marriage.
I do love fancy parties and appreciate attention to detail, and I love a nice gift! But these are the trappings...I dunno, there's something here about keeping these things in their proper places as ways of pointing toward the great spiritual, relational, etc. good of the thing or person we are celebrating. It's when it gets turned backwards that it is a problem.
This is lovely. I’m going to send this to my wife and
see if we can’t come up with an idea of our own!
Hurray! Be sure to make it easy and fun for yourselves, not just for the kids. (And please tell me what ideas the two of you come up with, or I will die of curiosity!)
“And that’s it. You don’t get the moon.” This made me laugh! I love the realism. It’s so nice to think about celebrating things without pressure!
It's so much easier when it's not already a huge, built-up thing!
My grandmother became a Jehovah’s Witness late in life. My father said she did it to avoid having to buy gifts for her grandkids on holidays. I’m not sure but Grandma said the JW’s were allowed to have “Happy Days.” Grandma always seemed to have one (strangely) a few days before her birthday. She’d buy herself a bunch of gifts 🤭
Hahaha! This made me laugh out loud!!
Well shoot, I'm Catholic so I'm gonna go ahead and have my standard birthday celebration AND my Happy Days. Presents all around! More presents, please!!
I'm Catholic too. One year my gma was living with us at Christmas. My father LOVED buying tons of gifts for his kids and we were opening them and having a great time. My gma insisted on living in the basement apartment, but she came up during this and announced that magically for her happy day (which fell on Christmas this year) she had bought herself a new car!
Oh my gosh!! That is hilarious!!
This is so much fun! Thanks for sharing this with me, Dixie.
No to get all emotional, but I needed to read this. I needed this reminder that all this liturgical living and seeking the Truth is pointed at joy in Christ. Not alway happiness necessarily, but ways to find simple joy and to remind us all that we’re loved.
I’ll be thinking on what my wife and I can add to our home.
I'm glad if it was a helpful reminder, Derek. That's what these family feast days are to me -- little interruptions that remind me that this is the good life, that I'm living with these blessings right now.
I'll be interested to hear if you and your wife decide to add anything!
This a very good idea! (Especially for low church folks like myself who lack feast days naturally built into their church calendar.) I love the low-key celebratory theme here along with the personalization which makes it meaningful rather than burdensome. Thank you for suggesting it.
Also, your image captions are hysterical. ;) It reminds me of the Trader Joe's captions on their ads and paper bags. I love that sort of thing.
I mean, why not have a little fun with it, right?
I don't know if you observe Lent, Abigail, but that i a time when these little feast day breaks are especially nice! And every Sunday is a feast day, of course!
I loved reading this! We have a few special-in-the-midst-of-the-ordinary days that we commemorate (the date of each of my sons' adoption finalizations, the first day of school breakfast, etc) and I hadn't really considered what makes them so much more meaningful and enjoyable than our other holidays and feasts until I read your words here. I think it's because they are not something observed in my broader community or culture (or shared with anyone outside my house, for that matter) and I therefore feel free to just be present and not perform or accomplish these commemorations in any way. Thank you for articulating this! I hope that after reading this, many readers will observe special days in the life of their families and reap the joy you talk about here.
Thank you, Susie! I was actually thinking about adoption anniversary observances when I was writing this; we are not an adoptive family but it came to mind as a potential example. Writing this all out helped me understand better why these small feast days work for us and why they are such a net positive, too!
I liked what another commenter said about even just having her dad wish her happy feast day a few times a year gave an extra dose of special rhythm to her childhood. I wonder if there's something about having the habit of noting these days that brings us back to the remembering to appreciate and rejoice in each other and our blessings, kind of like how having habits of prayer help ground us in the day or the week.
Yes, I agree! I think they can be small habits that don't seem like much at the time but can add up to something deeply life-giving down the road.
I love this so much and I love how inclusive you are. I can see how special these feast days would be for those with religious faith and it's wonderful to see how I can translate that into my non-religious family. Thank you for a lovely and inspiring piece!
Thank you, Genevieve! Yes, absolutely! I think things that are somehow connected to the rhythms of the year are especially good; I knew a family that did something like this for half-birthdays, for example, and I know others who mark the first day of spring, summer, fall, winter...
We celebrate name days and baptismal days too. I used to feel like I needed to make a special meal and dessert from scratch, but with four kids it got to be a lot (on top of the birthdays!) So now they get to pick out a store bought dessert on those days. Even if it’s a very busy day, it’s easy to run into a store and pick up ice cream or whatever, and the kids are thrilled!
I used to do a lot more for those days, too, until I wised up and realized that it being a little fun and a little special was all that was really needed. Thank goodness for the wisdom (or is it humility?!) that comes with experience, right?