Catholic A2Z - Y is for Year

One thing I love about being Catholic is living out the liturgical year.  I love that nearly every day we are celebrating the memory of some saint who has gone before us.  I love the change of the seasons, Advent, Christmas, Ordinary, Lent, the Triduum, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary time again.  And there's all sort of special days that dot the calendar all through the year.  I find one lives life at a deeper level, steeped in history and in a spiritual dimension that goes beneath the surface living of every day life.

A Catholic Liturgical Year Calendar

Children delight in living the liturgical year.  It is a joyful and meaningful way to pass on the faith.

A really sweet, old-fashioned children's picture book that explains all this is  My Book of the Church's Year by Enid M. Chadwick.  I think this book might even be Anglican, it really emphasizes English saints, but it does a wonderful job of conveying the idea of celebrating throughout the year.  You can see the whole book displayed here.

Another charming and more extensive way to introduce your children (and maybe yourself!) to the Church year is Catholic Mosaic by Cay Gibson.  This is a study guide that lists lovely picture books you can read out loud to your family throughout the year about the various seasons and saints.  This is a simple yet very effective way to learn about the Catholic faith.

For older kids, we used  The Loyola Kids Book of Saints by Amy Welborn a lot over the years.  I'd get up in the morning and look through this book to see if it was the feast or memorial of a saint and then read the short passage out loud to my kids over breakfast.  Now that I only have teens, we just go to the Saint of the Day site and listen to someone else read about the saint!

A nice book to help with celebrating various church feasts via crafts and desserts, is The Catholic Parent Book of Feasts.  Most people are familiar with things like Advent wreaths and Lenten fasting, but this book is chock full of ideas including special prayers, ideas for poetry and other activities (like creating a Mary garden), lots of recipes and lots of very short blurbs on the significance of the different saints' days.  And, for instance, if you are planning out the upcoming month, it is easy to thumb through it to get an idea or two to incorporate into family life.

For adults, I enjoy All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets and Witnesses for our Time.  This isn't an orthodox book, in that some of the people aren't Catholic or even Christian, so it doesn't technically follow every single Church feast day as such, but I find it well done and informative.

Another delightful book geared more for adults is Twelve Months of Monastery Soups.  Alas, I am not much of a cook and my family isn't especially into soups, but someone gave this to me as a gift and I love to thumb through it and enter the world of the monastery where everything moves to God's rhythm and every daily action is replete with devotion to God.