rorate caeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum
I'm feeling slightly down this evening. My mother had offered me our old family advent calendar and advent wreath. I assumed she had them already out. On our last day I asked where they were so I could pack them. She didn't actually know where they were. She looked, but could only find the advent calendar.
Because of the craziness re: almost-catastrophe and other vacation recovery, I wasn't able to even think about getting a wreath until last night, when I realized that this Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent and we had nothing! So I quickly started looking around and found a couple of decent and decently priced wreaths at a local Catholic bookstore.
I meant to go and buy them this morning while The Husband and The Pipster were at Daddy and Me breakfast, but by the time I had done some laundry, dishes, made breakfast for myself, etc, they were already back. But I thought it wouldn't be a problem because the store is near to where my husband works. However, he was feeling really grumpy and also said that he needed to go in early for possible overtime. He asked why I didn't go myself and I pointed out that taking Pippa into a store crowded with expensive breakables at multiple heights was a disaster waiting to happen. It turned into something of a fight. :(
Anyway the reality is that for the second year in a row we won't have an advent wreath. Lighting the advent candle on Sunday was always my favorite part of Advent as a child, and it's the one part of Advent that I think Pippa would get as ritual on some level.
Oh, and when they came back from breakfast, I showed Pippa the advent calendar and helped her get the treat out of it. She started looking in the other (empty) pouches for a treat (naturally, that's why I didn't fill them yet). Apparently the pouches were merely GLUED on, not sewn on, and she popped one off. Great. Now I have to fix this thing, and I have no fabric glue. Well, just forget it too. No Advent traditions this year for us. Yeah, I'm just about at that "I am taking my toys and going HOME" point.
I was planning on doing something fun for St. Nicholas Day but now I feel like that is going to end in inevitable failure too.
No, let's be positive. It's just going to be simple. I am going to buy some little sugar mandarins--one of Pippa's favorite fruits--and maybe dried cranberries, or some of her other favorites, like graham crackers. On December 5th we'll make a big show of putting her shoes by the front door. Then I'll pop a mandarin and the other food (in a little snack pack if it's messy/sticky) into the shoes. I will have LB so I'll put stuff in his shoes of course too. And talk to them about St. Nick when they wake up.
There. That's pretty simple, right? No way that I can mess that up.
My other thought... and here we're getting into mess-up territory... is to buy some wanton wrappers and make fried purse-shaped wontons. The linked recipe is for Thai style but really any kind of (cooked) filling should be alright, I think? I found another, almost identical recipe except made with chicken, mushrooms and bechamel. I'm thinking either leftovers or cheese. The idea here is the shape, which calls to mind the gold in sacks that St. Nicholas tossed through a window to a poor family to provide dowries for their daughters.
I think otherwise I'm going to leave off liturgical living until sapientia-tide at the earliest. Things are just too crazy around here.
Because of the craziness re: almost-catastrophe and other vacation recovery, I wasn't able to even think about getting a wreath until last night, when I realized that this Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent and we had nothing! So I quickly started looking around and found a couple of decent and decently priced wreaths at a local Catholic bookstore.
I meant to go and buy them this morning while The Husband and The Pipster were at Daddy and Me breakfast, but by the time I had done some laundry, dishes, made breakfast for myself, etc, they were already back. But I thought it wouldn't be a problem because the store is near to where my husband works. However, he was feeling really grumpy and also said that he needed to go in early for possible overtime. He asked why I didn't go myself and I pointed out that taking Pippa into a store crowded with expensive breakables at multiple heights was a disaster waiting to happen. It turned into something of a fight. :(
Anyway the reality is that for the second year in a row we won't have an advent wreath. Lighting the advent candle on Sunday was always my favorite part of Advent as a child, and it's the one part of Advent that I think Pippa would get as ritual on some level.
Oh, and when they came back from breakfast, I showed Pippa the advent calendar and helped her get the treat out of it. She started looking in the other (empty) pouches for a treat (naturally, that's why I didn't fill them yet). Apparently the pouches were merely GLUED on, not sewn on, and she popped one off. Great. Now I have to fix this thing, and I have no fabric glue. Well, just forget it too. No Advent traditions this year for us. Yeah, I'm just about at that "I am taking my toys and going HOME" point.
I was planning on doing something fun for St. Nicholas Day but now I feel like that is going to end in inevitable failure too.
No, let's be positive. It's just going to be simple. I am going to buy some little sugar mandarins--one of Pippa's favorite fruits--and maybe dried cranberries, or some of her other favorites, like graham crackers. On December 5th we'll make a big show of putting her shoes by the front door. Then I'll pop a mandarin and the other food (in a little snack pack if it's messy/sticky) into the shoes. I will have LB so I'll put stuff in his shoes of course too. And talk to them about St. Nick when they wake up.
There. That's pretty simple, right? No way that I can mess that up.
My other thought... and here we're getting into mess-up territory... is to buy some wanton wrappers and make fried purse-shaped wontons. The linked recipe is for Thai style but really any kind of (cooked) filling should be alright, I think? I found another, almost identical recipe except made with chicken, mushrooms and bechamel. I'm thinking either leftovers or cheese. The idea here is the shape, which calls to mind the gold in sacks that St. Nicholas tossed through a window to a poor family to provide dowries for their daughters.
I think otherwise I'm going to leave off liturgical living until sapientia-tide at the earliest. Things are just too crazy around here.