Our Saints' Day Party

Here are a couple shots of our All Saints' Day party decorations and goodies.

First we changed out our fall tablecloth for a blue one and set up a display to remember our guests of honor. A box and a little cotton batting did the trick. Then the challenge for the children was to find as many statues and holy cards as they could find to fill up the "cloud" under the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts statues decorating . This was quickly and happily done.

We then shared a lasagna dinner, followed by a plate of goodies. As much of our bakeware, etc., is packed for our upcoming move and we had an inspection scheduled for the house this morning, ease of cleanup was the name of the game, so we didn't bake, but went to the grocery story and bought the most cloud-like, fluffy goodies we could find for "Heavenly" dessert treats.

That ended up being cotton candy and those pink puffball things the children have been eying for some time now. (These won out over angel food cake even.) Everyone wanted eggnog, so we got some of that, too. That vanilla spice eggnog is Heavenly!

Then, we played the "Path to Heaven" game we made.

Using bits and pieces of scrapbooking paper, doilies and some print-outs off the 'puter, we fashioned a village with seven houses in it, each one representing one of the seven deadly sins. For instance, for the sin of wrath, we had the "Put Up Your Dukes Gym," and for gluttony, the "All You Can Eat & More Buffet."

At the top of the village is the church. Over that is Heaven, represented by the doily "clouds" and a fancy white castle, with the Holy Trinity in front of it (Can you make them out there?) At the bottom (horror and dread...) are the flames of hell, with a couple little cartoon devils even. Running from the bottom to the top is a narrow path... You know. Narrow and steep.

We printed out real life pictures of each of the children and "laminated" them, as well as the whole poster-board village with contact paper. Then we rolled up some tape to stick to the backs of each of the children's pictures.

The point of the game was for each of the children, blindfolded, to stick "themselves" somewhere on the village, hopefully avoiding any of the dangerous houses of the 7 deadly sins. You did well if you landed on the narrow path, or, of course in the church or in heaven. It was abysmal despair to land in (shudder...) the bad place. Everyone had a good time with this game, needless to say. But, we had to curtail the inclination of siblings to move each other around in the village when others had their backs turned... Kids.

We also played St Therese's Roses, a simple game, where one child held a small cloth bag open while another threw roses from several paces away and tried to hit the bag as many times out of five as possible.

And we played the St. Anthony Seek and Find Game, where one child hid the little felt angel you can see in the middle of the candy (above), while the others closed their eyes. Then called out "Dear St. Anthony, please come 'round; something's lost that must be found." And the others searched 'til someone found the little angel. The finder got to be the next hider.

Simple games, not much fuss, but everyone had a good time, I think. The saints had to be smiling.

Even at the Path to Heaven sabotage and silly pranks.

Don't you think there must be a lot of laughter in Heaven?