Happy St. Nicholas Day!

Our celebration of this day began early in the morning when the children ran downstairs to check their shoes. Today they found a candy cane, mandarin orange, some nuts, some chocolate coins, a few Hershey's kisses and some Werther's originals. There was also a note for each child that gave praise for accomplishments and one suggestion for improvement. It's a fun way to encourage the children in their Advent efforts to be good.

The Werther's, in their gold foil wrapping have served to represent coins in the years we couldn't find any chocolate ones at the right time, and now they are part of the tradition for us. This year, thanks to Elizabeth, I found some St. Nicholas coins. Perfect!

After breakfast, we prayed our morning prayer together. Today, we read the Mass readings and the prayers for the optional memorial of St. Nicholas. To conclude our prayers, we sang Veni, veni, Emmanuel! which we are learning in Latin.

Then it was storytime. We read Demi's The Legend of Saint Nicholas, our favorite St. Nicholas book since we found it at Inklings, our favorite independent bookstore in Yakima.



At the moment, Joseph is working on finishing his St. Nicholas book, which he has been coloring and writing in this week. Today's page includes symbols of St. Nicholas, which he is to add into a picture. I found the symbol information at my favorite online St. Nicholas resource: St. Nicholas Center.

Tonight we will have a (sort of) German dinner of bratwurst, sauerkraut, potatoes, and applesauce. For dessert (yes, a mid-week dessert in honor of our favorite Saint of Advent), we will bake gingerbread this afternoon: the cake kind, served with whipped cream. This might be more southern US than German, but gingerbread seems German to me, and we all enjoy the dessert, so it works for us. It makes the house smell good, too. :-)

Reading the Jesse tree story while we eat dinner has been working much better than the years when we tried to read it before dinner with waiting, hungry children jiggling in chairs. So we will continue this way each night. We are still reading a short meditation when the wreath is lighted before our Grace Before Meals. Thanks to The Magnificat Advent Companion, the meditation relates to the Gospel of the day, which we read in our morning devotions, so the day of prayer comes full circle with the dinnertime meditation.