Celebrate Today- ceremonies and celebrations to make your days count

On New Year's Eve each year, we take a family picture writing the numbers of the new year on our hands, and I put this picture inside a mason jar. Then through the year, we put things in the jar like movie stubs, business cards from favorite restaurants visited, ribbons and medals from races, and other memorabilia that will fit in the jar.   We now have 6 of these jars, but we had never gone through these to look at the contents of the jars. The other night, I pulled these out and we emptied them during dinnertime.   It was well worth the time to look at old pictures and relive some memories.  Good times indeed.

On Epiphany (last week on January 6th), we pulled out the chalk and marked the door for the new year.   When we shared a meal with our sweet friends the Murrays last weekend, we extended our Epiphany celebration and read together the liturgy  that we use each year.  This liturgy is one of my favorites as it is a time to remember what  St. Benedict said over 1500 years ago that "all people who present themselves should be welcomed as Christ."  Heidi Haverkamp writes, "Receive every person who comes through your door as though  they  were bringing Jesus to you. Receive every person you meet as though you were encountering the face of Christ......Part of what makes a monastery a healthy place is to receive guests, so that the monks or sisters don’t get turned in on themselves, or imagine that they’re the center of the world, or that only they are good Christians. Part of what makes a church a healthy place is to receive guests, so that...

Our Advent calendar helps us count days until Christmas.   My grandparents created a beautiful Advent calendar out of wood.   They cut out and painted 25 ornaments to be hung on the wooden tree, and one ornament is put up for each day.   When my brother and I were little, we would get to pick odd or even numbers and put up ornaments on those corresponding days, and we have continued this same tradition in our family.    As we got closer to December 25, the tree had more and more ornaments helping to build anticipation for Christmas.   For some reason or another, my grandfather would always put the turtle on the top of the tree as a joke instead of the sweet angel that my grandmother most likely intended to go on top.   Through the years, it has been fun to continue that tradition and make sure that the turtle keeps his place on top of the tree. Through the years, it's the little traditions like this that bring joy and help us remember and celebrate o...

St. Nicholas' Feast Day is December 6th, but it seems that as with holiday busyness and with a lot going on, some celebrations have to get extended or postponed.  Grace abounds this season. :)  So, we celebrated a couple days late with our annual secret St. Nicholas candy delivery. We covered little candy bars with these St. Nicholas' papers (instead of the traditional practice of baking St. Nicholas cookies) and delivered them to neighbor's doorsteps under the cover of the night.   (It's like "booing" around Halloween and dropping off May Day flowers in the spring.  We practically have one time each season to try to knock on neighbor's doors, leave a treat, and run like the wind trying not to get caught!)  There is a wonderful reflection on St. Nicholas  here  from a weekly blog that shares on art and faith.  I loved the benediction in the reflection:   "May God give us all a heart of mercy like St. Nicholas; eyes ...

We write letters of what we are thankful for each year and keep them in a notebook. Having started this in 1995, it's such a treat to have these little time capsules from each year.  When we have celebrated Thanksgiving at other family's houses,  we would not ask everyone to participate, and just the four of us in our immediate family would write letters and read them together later over the holiday weekend.  Over the last few years when we have hosted Thanksgiving at our house, we have invited those gathered with us to write a letter if they wanted to (making sure they understood that there was no pressure) to read around our table after our Thanksgiving feast.   The best thing was that this year, we had Marcet Crockett with us who is a sophomore at SPU and we invited her to write a letter. I pulled out our notebook of Thanksgiving letters and was able to show her three letters from 1998 when we spent Thanksg...

      When Anna was about 18 months old, I was invited to a service called “The Crossing” that a family from our church put together for their 13 year old son. As Christians do not have a particular rite of passage like in the Jewish tradition of having a Bar Mitzvah, they wanted to mark this time in his life of turning 13 and entering adolescence with a significant ceremony.  The year leading up to this event was one that involved a year-long service project, a retreat with some significant people in his life, a father/son trip, and a service at our church.   They also gathered a group of people when their son turned 12 and asked them to commit to praying for their son through the year up until his 13th birthday, and then these people gathered around his 13th birthday to speak words of blessing to him.   Since they took the whole year to do all these things, it was not overwhelming, and their intentionality helped to make this a ve...

One family we knew in Nashville had a Wheel of Candy in their frontyard (like a wheel of fortune that you could spin.) Trick-or-treaters could get in line to spin the wheel. They might land on the words that said that they won one, two or three pieces of candy. They might land on the words that said that they would lose one, two or three pieces of candy.    Or, the other option was that they might win a vegetable.   Back in 2004, Anna spun the wheel and won a piece of celery when she was two, and it was the prize of the evening. She carried it around like a trophy all night.        We took this tradition with us to Seattle when we moved out west and created our own Wheel of Candy. We've enjoyed it for the last few years as one of the ways we welcome people to our house on Halloween.      2012 2013 2014 2015 Because our kids brought home WAY too much cand...