Here we are on the final day of February. Tomorrow Armadillos will open and the high in town will be -6.
-6!
It must be March. Always the hardest month . . .
A friend so wisely pointed out the beauty of Lent falling this way for us in these northern climes. The agony of more snow, more cold, more gray while we suffer with our Lord.
Good times.
The girls worked on a crown of thorns that I could share with some different groups in town. As I hurried about getting other things ready, I heard them chatting.
“Lent’s not as fun as Advent, but we’ve still got to do it.” Ellie observed.
Word.
So we are preparing. We’ve already cried over possible fasts. We’ve decided on some prayer commitments (we are filling our calendar in with 40 different names – one for each day) and are looking forward to all of the liturgies and feasts, too. We hope to do it up right.
We will start, of course, with Mardi Gras on Tuesday. This year we are doing a formal masquerade. The boys are unimpressed. Past years can be found here, here, and here.
We’ve purchased a box of 800 toothpicks for the crown of thorns. We won’t use that many but if we average just 1 sacrificial act per walking person in the house for the 40+ days of Lent, that’s over 300 hundred thorns that must be placed in a crown.
Whoa. How’s that for perspective? Instructions on our crown here.
I haven’t quite figured out how we will keep the Stations of the Cross up on the wall this year with Gemma about (she does take particular delight in tearing things down . . . ). We’ve used this set before and this set. This is a fun colorful set that you can purchase.