I had the greatest of intentions to write about each of the liturgical calendar feasts we observed this year, starting with Michaelmas back in September, but here we are in January having had Michaelmas, All Saints’ Day, St. Lucia Day, St. Nicholas Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas itself, and Epiphany, and I have written about none of them. I guess we’re just setting the bar for 2022 goals very, very low.

I suppose we could have leaned into each one of these holidays a bit more - in fact, I think Michaelmas probably had the most intentionality about it, and each holiday/feast day afterward had a bit less, but I've really enjoyed the traditions we’ve started, and we can always build on them as time goes by!

As such, here’s a brief rundown of what we did for each.

Michaelmas

This one largely followed the same pattern of what we did last year. Like before, my agenda for the day was to go exploring outside, pick some asters for our dining room table, have a feast, and sing a hymn after dinner. Most of that went well, although after finding quite a few bugs on our wild asters, I decided that next year…we’ll plant some asters in our garden and harvest those instead.

True to form, our feast involved a roasted chicken, carrots (because tradition!), and a St. Michael’s bannock, and this year I did find a way to incorporate a blackberry dessert that wasn’t straight up blackberry pie, and it was a hit. Thanks, Claire Saffitz/the Dessert Person cookbook, for an excellent blackberry tart recipe!

I know I mentioned All Saints Day in my first paragraph, but upon looking through pictures from the past several months, apparently we did nothing that day. Room for improvement next year, I guess. We DID dress up for Halloween though, which maybe sort of counts? Unless it’s blasphemous? Jury’s out on that one. I’m including it here only because Charlotte and Wilbur were awfully cute.

While Fern Arable made an appearance, Farmer Zuckerman preferred to be behind the camera lens instead of in front of it.

Moving on to Advent!

We do “regular” Advent activities, including a Jesse tree (I think we made it through day 16 or so this year, so it’s a work in progress), a chocolate Advent calendar from Trader Joe’s (because who doesn’t love chocolate?), and decorating the house (which I suppose should traditionally be done on Christmas Eve, but a decorated house is so festive!), but then there are some feast days during Advent that we’ve built into our Advent routine over the past couple of years that I really like.

St. Nicholas Day

As an Anglican, I’m ashamed to say this one wasn’t on my radar until last year, when I saw other Anglican and Catholic moms posting on social media about it. At that point I realized we were missing out on some fun, and immediately decided to do something about it the night before it happened. This year, I was slightly more prepared. The kids put their shoes by the door the night before, and in the morning, they were filled with chocolate coins and oranges! Maybe next year we’ll go all out and add some fuzzy socks or something, but this year, we kept it pretty simple. We also read a book about St. Nicholas, but also the sugar from the chocolate coins mostly prevented us from doing anything productive until the second half of the day. Keep that in mind if you decide to participate in the future.

The following week brought us to the next feast day!

St. Lucia Day

St. Lucia Day was tied at our house for least effort involved. We busted out our anglaspel Christmas decoration (which I LOVE - new favorite Christmas decoration by a long shot) and made ourselves some lussekatter saffron buns. That afternoon, Elise had a bad headache, so the day sort of ended on a low note, but the holiday was marked nonetheless.

The next few weeks were marked more by Advent/Christmas church services, including my favorite service of the year for oboe-playing: Lessons and Carols. By the time we get to that service, it usually feels like Christmas has officially arrived, even though it’s a few weeks ahead of time. Per usual, it was full of jollity, and this year I was able to do two of them, which made it even more fun. With all the festivities leading up to Christmas, however, I was getting a bit tired trying to figure out how to balance feasting with church schedules…

Christmas Eve

…Enter Sally Clarkson with a timely Instagram post (and blog) about how her family always did a simple Shepherd’s Meal on Christmas Eve, and I instantly knew that was the solution. Our menu became a crockpot soup with sourdough baked in the morning, alongside fruit, nuts, and cheese. We gathered family after our Christmas Eve church service, lit as many candles as we could find, turned out all the lights (except for Christmas lights, of course!) and enjoyed our meal. While I can’t speak for the rest of the family, it was perhaps my favorite observance of this whole string of feasts. We’ll definitely repeat this new-to-us tradition next year!

Christmas Day

Christmas Day itself always starts the same way at our house with a blurry picture, presents for our immediate family, and cinnamon rolls (confession: this year, they came from Costco rather than our own oven).

After that, we get together with the family again, and this year we went to my parents’ house. While I can’t really claim this as liturgically-focused, we do always have a Yule Log cake, and while I didn’t roll it particularly well this year, the taste made up for its appearance!

The day included your standard stockings, presents, and feasting, but we finished the day with carol singing thanks to our resident pianist and a large number of various hymnals. Fortunately, most of them had the same words, so we all sounded relatively together!

In the days following, our family promptly got sick, although we have (thus far) avoided Covid somehow, and we remained cycling through each member being sick for the remainder of Christmastide. New Year’s Eve happened without much fanfare, James had a birthday during which he was stricken with RSV and a double ear infection, and we watched far more tv shows than were good for us all the way through to Epiphany. As a result, Epiphany was a last-minute after thought that was only noted by the baking of a galette des rois, which was very tasty.

Next year, we might add in a blessing of the home from the Book of Common Prayer and/or a parade with the wise men from our nativity set, with We Three Kings as festive music to go along with it, but we’ll see!

Now we have a little break, but after quite the litany of feasts and such, a break feels quite restful! It’s been such a joy to really delve into the richness that the liturgical calendar has to offer, because the more reminders we have of God’s goodness, the more we remember it day to day. I’m so grateful to have those reminders for myself, but even more so to be able to make them part of our family culture. Thanks be to God.

Woodstock Writings