Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

I am determined to try to celebrate the feast days as much as possible.  With that as my goal, I have been a little busy, other than with schooling the kids, in making little craft projects to help with decorating and to augment the celebration.  I have also perused the web for craft projects and ideas for the kids to complete.  We held our homeschool St. Valentine's Day Party last

Friday.  This has become a yearly tradition for us.  The kids enjoy seeing their friends, and the younger ones enjoy exchanging Valentines.  The best part is the snacking!  For our craft, I used one of Lacy's ideas from over at Catholic Icing.  We made Sacred Heart Decade Rosaries.  I was able to purchase the medals and crucifixes in time from Autom and receive them in time for the party.

Part of hosting, is that I provide the paper products and make the punch.  We always make a sherbert punch.  This year, I used ginger ale, cranberry-raspberry juice, and since they didn't have raspberry sherbert, I used fruit punch. The punch is red and pink and very tasty.  It always goes pretty fast!

We also made some cupcakes to share along with the treats our friends would bring.

For our home celebration, to lead up to Valentine's Day, I downloaded Lacy's St. Valentine Countdown Chain.  I also crocheted up this cute heart garland. The directions can be found here at Skip to My Lou. (I am currently crocheting one with shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day.)  She also had some cute Valentine "Sour Cream" Containers.  I made some of them and added some candies for the kids.  Yummm! 

I added a painted Saint Valentine to our collection of wooden saint dolls.  To symbolize St. Valentine, I added a rooster (one of his many symbols, which includes:  roses, birds, and more).  For whimsy, I added white envelopes, perhaps containing Valentines.  It is always fun to paint the saints like this.  I have been adding to our collection here and there.  To make it easy on me, I also put the date of the saint's feast in marker on the bottom of the doll.  This way, I can keep track of who it is and try to remember to put the doll on our altar for their feast day.  They get to join Father Oak!   (It's a lot easier to pull out the paints and supplies now that the craft room is much neater and organized.  The trick is to put it back where you got it from as soon as you are finished!)

We are making pizza for lunch today.  I hope to have it heart-shaped in some way. 

Have a most happy and blessed Saint Valentine's Day!

God Bless,

Jennifer