Celebrating the Feast of St. Joseph

 

We are so excited to celebrate the feast of St Joseph on March 19th and honor the wonderful foster Father of Jesus and Husband of Mary.  We started by praying the St Joseph novena starting on March 10th with the great prayer printable and Lilly craft from CatholicIcing.com.

As she explains on CatholicIcing.com:

"What’s with the lilies? Well, that’s where the counting part comes in. Lilies are a popular symbol of St. Joseph because they stand for purity. He’s often pictured holding lilies.  After saying your prayer each day, lay one of the lilies in front of St. Joseph. When you have all 9 lilies in front of St. Joseph, your novena is complete!"

This was a long prayer so I prayed the prayer and our boys listened while I prayed and then each day they took turns with the flowers. 

It is tradition on the feast of St Joseph to make an altar, which was started in Sicily, Italy where they prayed to St Joseph to help them from the terrible famine in their land.  It was said that after their prayers there was a great rain and they grew a great harvest and then created an table with the food they harvested.  You can check out some awesome ideas about setting up a St Joseph's altar from A Slice of Smith Life HERE!

I explained this story to our boys and talked about setting up an altar and our 5 year old said, "Mom, I thought St Joseph was a carpenter? Why don't we just build something to celebrate him!"  One of the great things about homeschooling is following our children's interests! I agreed with my son that Joseph was a carpenter so off to Lowes we went to get some of their fun building sets. So now today we are going to be little carpenters to help celebrate St Joseph's day this year.  We are still going to keep our St Joseph statue and our novena lilies displayed throughout the day as well.

 

Also, to honor St Joseph as a Father we are going to make sure to do a few special things for my husband as well on this feast day!  During our homeschool time we are going to read about St. Joseph in our book Saints for Young Readers and also do our St Joseph coloring page from our Seton Pre-Kindergarten curriculum!  We will also read Song of the Swallows for this solemnity and follow the discussion questions from Catholic Mosaic.

 

Although we never heard directly from Joseph in the Bible he remains a key figure in Christianity through his relationship with Jesus.  Pope Benedict XVI once said:

"There is but one fatherhood, that of God the Father, the one Creator of the world, "of all that is seen and unseen."  Yet man, created in the image of God, has been granted a share in this one paternity of God (Ephesians 3:15).  Saint Joseph is a striking case of this, since he is a father, without fatherhood according to the flesh.  He is not the biological father of Jesus, whose Father is God alone, and yet he lives his fatherhood fully and completely.  To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth.  Saint Joseph, in this sense, gave proof of great devotion.  For the sake of Christ he experienced persecution, exile and the poverty which this entails.  He had to settle far from his native town.  His only reward was to be with Christ."

Our reward also is to be with Christ!  St Joseph, pray for us!