Advent Feast Days and Saints

Today is the day!  The day that Advent begins, the time that we prepare our hearts to the birth of Jesus.  As much as we like to do activities during Advent to help in our preparation and learning about Jesus we also love to celebrate the Saints!  We enjoy celebrating the feast days of the saints throughout the year in our home and some of our favorite Saints happen to have feast days during Advent!  Here are a few that we celebrate:

1.  St Andrew:  Advent kicks off with the feast day of St Andrew today on November 30th.  Our plan is to get out our Advent activities, open our first of our daily Advent books with the children, say the blessing over our Advent Wreath, start our St Andrew's novena and have a fish dinner (because St Andrew was a fisherman!)

One thing that we are doing new this year in our home is having an Advent tree.  This tree has ornaments that are purple, pink and silver (like the colors of the Advent wreath candles) and where we will hang our Jesse Tree Ornaments.

Putting up our Advent tree this weekend

2.  St Nicholas:  St. Nicholas's feast day on December 6th is our kids favorite!  After a few years of having kids my husband and I decided that we were not going to celebrate Santa Claus at Christmas and instead just focus on the feast of St Nicholas.  (We still do presents on Christmas Day but focus them as Jesus's birthday presents and the 3 gifts from the Magi). For the Feast of St Nicholas they write letters to the Christ Child and set them out with their shoes on the night of December 5th.  We then get each of the children little gifts from St Nicholas (chocolate gold coins, clementines, candy canes, and a small book or activity).  There are a lot of awesome ideas at the St Nicholas Center with fun activities to do and a lot of history about St Nicholas. 

Our kids also LOVE the Veggietales movie St Nicholas: A Story of Joyful Giving.  They still go around the house singing "Greece is the town of Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas..."  This year our homeschool co-op is also having a party on St Nicholas's feast day with a special appearance from St Nicholas himself!  We love celebrating St Nicholas early in Advent, and then shifting the focus to Jesus's birth at Christmas!

 

A sweet photo of our youngest son last year on St Nicholas's feast day with our parish priest who dressed as St Nicholas!

3.  Immaculate Conception:  On December 8th we celebrate the Immaculate Conception which is when the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived in her mother's womb (St Anne) free from original sin.  This day we go to mass (since it is a holy day of Obligation) and are going to try to eat things white (representing purity of sin)!  We also like this coloring sheet that helps show what we are celebrating in an easy way for kids to understand!

From CatholicIcing.com

 4. St Juan Diego:  Do you remember when I talked about how our children love our Saint Mail Subscription?  Well the December saint this year is St Juan Diego, who's feast day is December 9th!  We have never celebrated his feast day before, but we are excited to add some of their fun activities to the day and will make Mexican food for dinner to help with our celebration!  A few things that Saint Mail suggests doing is bundling up and taking a 1 mi walk and to talk about how St Juan Diego used to walk 15 mi each way to mass and how he must have felt, and also making some tissue paper flowers!  If you are still looking for a great Christmas present for your children/grandchildren, etc Saint Mail would be a wonderful gift! 

Our First Delivery from Saint Mail!

5.  Our Lady of Guadalupe:  We celebrate the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12th.  This is the day that we use as a tribute to Jesus's mother Mary, and is usually most celebrated by Americans of Mexican heritage as Mary is Mexico's patron saint.  In 1531 Our Lady of Guadalupe was said to appear to St Juan Diego as he was walking to mass and she asked Juan to tell the bishop to build a church at the site where he was.  She then told Juan to go to the hill where they first met and Juan found flowers in the frozen ground.  He gathered them in his cloak and brought them to the bishop.  When Juan opened his cloak for the bishop the flowers that fell to the ground were roses that were not even grown in Mexico and also an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his cloak! 

 

Often these two feast days are celebrated together as the stories of these two saints are together and as their feast days occur in the same week!  We will take time to say a decade of the rosary and continue in some Mexican food fun! 

 

Our Candle and Book about Our Lady of Guadalupe

6.  St Lucy:  St Lucy's feast day is on December 13th and we have started the tradition that we drive around and look at Christmas lights as a family this day since St Lucy is the saint of light!  It's so much fun to get a thermos of hot cocoa, get the kids in pajamas, put on some Advent Music and have special time as a family!  Also, we now have her special peg doll that we painted from our swap this year, and one of our new Advent books this year is Lucia:  Saint of Light, so we will also read that book to learn more about her history.

 

 

Celebrating St Lucy's feast day last year

7.  Pope Francis's Birthday:  Although not a feast day, Pope Francis's birthday is on December 17th, and this is a great day to talk about the role of the Pope in our Church with our children and also pray for Pope Francis!  One of the books we are reading this year is Max and Benedict: A Bird's Eye View of the Pope's Daily Life.  Although this book is about Pope Benedict it is a great story and example of the Pope's daily life!  We might also make a cake to help celebrate (because we can always use another excuse for a cake!)  Below is a puppet craft from CatholicIcing.com that we did last year on Pope Francis's birthday!

Also just released from Catholic Icing is this adorable Advent Saints Ornament Craft that includes ALL of these saints!  We just bought it and I am so excited to add it to our celebrations this Advent! 

Advent Ornaments from Catholic Icing

These are a few of our extra celebrations during Advent that we love.  We also get to celebrate our middle son's baptism anniversary during Advent on December 11th!  The kids love being able to celebrate on their birthdays, baptism anniversaries and name Saint feast days!