Another All Saints' Day in the books...just a week late over here, don't mind me. But I wanted to make sure I recorded some of our memories from this one! We mixed things up a bit this year. Instead of throwing our traditional party, we joined up with two smaller parties - one at our parish and one through our local homeschool group - and then we did our own thing at home on All Saints' evening.
I didn't make a thing this year for costumes which I'm very thankful for since life lately has been intense. Pieces were either shopped from the house, the All Saints' costume bin, or made by the boys. You can see a whole history of our saints as well as all my tips for saint costumes in this post! The lineup this year...
Saint George the Martyr
Saint Joseph
Saint Aloysius
Saint Louis IX
Saint Dunstan
(Apparently he was a metal worker and blacksmith (?) so my oldest wore his smithing gear!)
And poor Baby Peter didn't get to be anything which he didn't care one whiff about.
Our homeschool party included Mass just for our group, quick presentations, and I brought along a whole bunch of saint guessing jars, the banner, coloring pages, and heavenly crowns to design.
I've executed enough All Saints' parties over the years to know what activities are worth the effort and which ones are not. The guessing jars are always a hit! The cost does add up but it's worth it for the amount of chaos diminished when the kids have a focused task with prizes like this! (The banner and jar labels are from the generous Jessica at Shower of Roses and the guessing sheets are from Catholic Inspired.)
In the evening we had our fun "snacky" dinner and played Saint Bingo which was actually more fun than I was expecting, ha! I picked the saint and gave a clue and they had to guess who it was.
Two of the boys insisted that they wanted to make our Saint Michael pinata this year! Normally I just buy it off Amazon but if they were willing to figure it out, I was all for not buying one. I love what they came up with using cardboard boxes, streamers, and a whooole lot of tape.
We now have enough people in this house to do the pinata all on our own! And it's *slightly* less chaotic than it started getting at our parties with 25 or 30 kids taking turns with the sword!
I hope you had a wonderful All Saints' Day! God hasn't seen fit to give me the time or ability to write much here which is super hard but I'm trying to remember that I will be able to write again some day. Here's hoping I can get back to it soon. Until then, if you read this, say a prayer for us please? We'll be fine...life is just crazy busy, intense, and often overwhelming lately! But good. God is always good.
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I love all of this! My girls will be 2 and 5 this month, so I'm tucking the game ideas away for when they're a bit older! Love the homemade pinata - it looks great!
ReplyDeleteI am praying for you and for your family, Mary. You are a beautiful Mother, and a holy witness of generous and redemptive love.
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