Last Day of March, First Day of April

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Annunciation (postponed 'til the 31st due to its regular day falling in Holy Week this year). What a joyful and beautiful feast! This is the day the Archangel Gabriel brought the Virgin Mary the most important message ever delivered. This is the day that God came to earth, the day Our Blessed Mother consented to be the Mother of God. Today begins the nine month count-down to Christmas, the birthday of Jesus.

In celebration, we'll crown Our Lady 's statue with a circlet of white roses. We'll sing Mother Dearest Mother Fairest, Hail Holy Queen and maybe Sing of Mary (below). We'll also get some white flowers and arrange them around the feet of our statue.

For dinner, in honor of the perfect purity and beauty of Mary, the girls and I want to try to make an all-white menu. I'm thinking chicken breasts, curried rice and shrimp salad and white rolls. Also, hmm... maybe cauliflower. But, it'd be fun to find some white asparagus (if I can afford it!) and blend up some hollandaise. (Just to make it good and fattening.) We'll have either white grape juice or iced white tea to drink. Then, for dessert we'll make some cream puffs sprinkled in powdered sugar, or, if we're feeling really ambitious, maybe some divinity (though this is such son, Jon's, specialty, nobody else around here has ever bothered to learn how to make it... )


For school, we found a few activities, templates, and coloring pages at this site. I'm hoping to find time to explore these beautiful Annunciation icons and talk about the symbolism of icons with the children. We'll also hopefully get to read about the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth.

Also, since the great Archangel Gabriel has special importance in our home (our tenth child is named for him), I'll probably run through the choirs of angels with the children and explain the orders of rank in Heaven. I'm hoping to look through some Old Masters' paintings online and print out the largest, best version of St. Gabriel we can find, back him with cardboard and tack him near our statue of the Blessed Mother somewhere. If we're really ambitious, we may try to create or cut out other angels to place near her feet, as well. We'll see how much we can get to.

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Then, on Tuesday, to welcome in the new month of April, and in the spirit of lightheartedness, we'll play with some Palindromes and topsy turveys . I'll post a few fun ones I found tomorrow night. And, who knows what other surprises and foolishness we might discover? Stay tuned. &:o)