Feast Days...

YESTERDAY WAS THE glorious Feast of the Ascension of our Lord! While we weren't able to do all that I would have liked it was a lovely feast. Feast days are such an important aspect of living the domestic church. When my oldest was young our whole education schedule was wrapped around the liturgical year. Feast days were days off and we always attended Vespers and Liturgy. At the time we belonged to a mission and my hubby was the only Reader for a time so we attended everything. My son always looked forward to the feasts of the church, mostly because he had the day off school I'm sure, but at least that's something.

It's important to me to have my children celebrate the feasts of the church. It's how we follow the life of Christ and honor his visitation on humanity. It never made sense to me that most people only celebrate Christ's birth and resurrection. What about what happened in between? I want my children to know and celebrate all the feast of the church. I'm slowly, very slowly working my way back to the rhythm of the liturgical year. What I was able to do with one I find more challenging to do with three. I say three because my oldest gets up and makes it to church on his own. We are blessed to live on the church property, so we can just walk down the hill.

Even though we were not able to make it to services for this feast this year we did observe the feast at home. For each of the 12 Great Feasts of the Church I always read about the feast, the children color the icon, we do an activity and often times I have something in the kitchen that we make. I also try to teach them the troparion for the feast. The problem here is that I'm still not great at all the tones without the aid of the choir. So we solider on and do our best.

All these things are wonderful tools to help teach about Christ, his visitation and why and how we, as mere humans can become more like Him. I think if you want to keep Christ in Christmas then we need to keep all His feasts and through these experiences we are more able to attempt to reflect his humanity and experience true joy that only He can bring.

Troparion - Tone 4
O Christ God, You have ascended in Glory,
Granting joy to Your disciples by the promise of the Holy Spirit.
Through the blessing they were assured
That You are the Son of God,
The Redeemer of the world!