St Lucy Day

The prepped dough for our St Lucy's Day breakfast.
Braided in a circle like this it is called "St. Lucy's Crown."
Once baked, I'll drizzle it with icing before serving.  

St. Lucy day is one of my favorite holidays that we have added this year. Although widely celebrated in other countries (particularly Sweden), it is not traditional in my part of the world. I don't know anyone else personally who celebrates it, but it is such a delightful holiday I'm not sure why not.

St. Lucia's was a 3rd century Christian Martyr under Diocletian. As the story goes, she was born to wealthy parents but her father died when she was 5. After God answered her prayer for her mother to be healed of a long term illness, Lucia sought--and received--her mother's permission to distribute much of their wealth to the suffering Christians. Lucia did much of this with her own hand, delivering food to the Christians hiding in the catacombs. As she wanted to carry as much as possible to them, she devised a crown with candles on it to leave both hands free to carry food. Denounced as a Christian by a  rejected suitor, she was martyred in Sicily around 310AD, at about the age of 27.

Traditionally the celebration of St. Lucy's day starts early in the morning as the eldest daughter in the family dresses as St. Lucy in a white gown and red sash. She wears a crown of ligonberry set with seven lighted candles, as St. Lucy did. Younger daughters are her handmaids, also dressed in white with a crimson sash but instead of a crown with candles they carry a single candle.  The daughters serve coffee or mulled wine and a special yeast bread, called "St. Lucy's Crown," to their parents in bed, to commemorate St. Lucy bringing food to the Christians.

Given the ages involved we did not do real candles. Someday, maybe. We didn't actually do fake ones either, mainly because I completely forgot to buy any. It turned out that the greenery I had for the crowns had white berry bunches, sooooo those were the "candles" this year. Fortunately I hadn't mentioned anything about candles--real or otherwise-- to the girls, so there was no disappointment on their end. We'll do something more fancy next year.

The bread is quite similar to cinnamon rolls, except instead of being flavored with raisins/cinnamon it is flavored with oranges. This gave me the idea to use a trick I'd learned years ago on cinnamon rolls. I made the dough ahead of time, braided it, and put it in the freezer. The night before St. Lucy's Day I unwrapped it, put it on a pan, and put the pan in the (cold) oven overnight. I set a timer for the oven early the next morning and went to bed. Overnight the braided loaf thawed and rose, and sometime much earlier than I cared to get up, the oven turned itself on and began baking. By the time my alarm went off the next morning, the bread was almost done and the house smelled amazing.

Given the ages involved, I got up early and got the plates ready. I woke the girls up, helped them get dressed, handed out the plates and the crowns and the mugs of coffee half-filled (lots of trepidation on that last one....). Then I hurried back to bed and pretended to have been asleep all along--and completely astonished--as "St. Lucia" and her "handmaid" brought us breakfast in bed. My guess is it'll be a few years before St. Lucia is old enough to take over, but in the meantime, the more authentic we make it the more excited they'll be about independence next year. It's the long game. I can wait.

The nice breakfast was the main event of the day this year, but next year I would love to have another family or two over and have a Swedish feast. I'm thinking meatballs, ligonberry jam, a St. Lucy's Crown for dessert (probably coffee cake, so it isn't exactly the same as breakfast). We could do a procession leading up to the feast, and have the children serve. Or, perhaps, the kids could put on a play about Saint Lucy's life. There are also traditional songs to go with the holiday, which I didn't have a chance to learn or teach this year. But that is okay. The beautiful thing about family traditions is that they can be added onto gradually, and every stage is special.

Have you ever celebrated Saint Lucia's Day? If so, what did you do?

St Nicolas Day

This year we celebrated St. Nicolas day for the first time. Falling right at the beginning of Advent on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day focuses in on the man behind Santa Claus, Nicolas, the Bishop of Myra. The name Santa Clause comes from his real name Saint (Ni)Clause.

There are almost as many legends around the real person as there are around the jolly old man in a red coat. Depending on where you look you will get many versions of the same story. It is a consistent theme that he was a man of mercy, and fought against poverty and prostitution. In one of the more common tales he secretly spent a great deal to give dowries to three daughters of a poor man who could not marry without a dowry. They were to be sold to be prostituted to pay for their father's debts, but the gifts that St. Nicholas gave were more than enough for them to be married instead.

In early December we read many stories about Santa and St. Nicholas--both the real and the fictionalized man. We read about the legends associated with the Bishop, and the little elves who help Santa make gifts. I had picture books and audio stories for both. I'm sure there are movies also, but we don't tend to watch many movies these days--though I do think we made room for a fun evening of popcorn and Arthur Christmas (the family favorite Christmas movie).

The traditional way to celebrate St. Nicholas day is with moulded cookies called Speculaus. Speculas cookies are claimed by assorted countries--Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland being a few. I had never made Speculas before, so I did a lot of reading up on it, and found out it was quite a challenging skill. I purchased a mold and tried a test recipe. It was a complete flop. So then I purchased a book full of recipes. The second try went better. It was still pretty obvious that I was new to the fancy-cookie making business, but all the cookies were the proper shape, only a few stuck to the mold, and I could even see most of the image on most of the cookies. I felt like a magic worker.

Another tradition of the holiday is for the children to set their shoes by the window. In the middle of the night St. Nicholas comes and fills their shoes with either apples, oranges, candy, and nuts (for the good children) or switches and coal (bad children). In our version I had the girls each set out one of their shoes outside their room before they went to bed. The next morning the shoes each held (spilling out) a candy cane, a pouch with a couple St Nicolas cookies, and an orange. They were delighted.

Something I wasn't expecting happened as we added this holiday to our Advent season--suddenly the conflict between the secularized Christmas focused on getting gifts and the Christian Christmas of focusing on the true Gift, Christ the babe, melted away. Santa had his day. December 6th. There was room to spend a week or two reveling in the silliness of fat elves and an imaginative story of the North Pole. There was room to spend time with the true Bishop, to talk about the legends and guess at what seeds of the legends had actually happened. There was room to celebrate him simply. And then we moved on to the rest of Christmas--most of Christmas--which was focused on Christ himself. It was quite lovely--and I'm sure the good Bishop would approve.

Hallelujah: An Advent book by Cindy Rollins

When I found out that Cindy Rollins had written an advent book I was so excited!! I first heard of her when my hubby directed me to her blog right before it was closed. He wanted me to look it over before all the good stuff was put away (It's up again, so take a look!). Later she published two books, Mere Motherhood, and A Handbook to Morning time. These books were so wonderful to read in the immediate postpartum after Robert was born--in fact, I'd finished both of them within his first week! Her writing style is easy to read, and I felt like I was growing and learning right alongside her as I read the story of her homeschooling years.


Hallelujah is her plan for listening through the Hallelujah chorus throughout the advent season. She's broken the piece down to daily sections with corresponding scripture readings that make daily listenings very manageable. They run from about 3 minutes to about 11 minutes long, and we typically listened to it over dinner while lighting our advent candles. It was such a joy to hear my daughters singing along with it--even though they are not reading quite yet there was enough repeat in the piece itself that there were many parts they were able to sing along.

In addition to the daily guide to listening to the Messiah, Cindy has included some recipes and thoughts on celebrating the advent and Christmas seasons, weekly hymns, poems, and suggestions for the smaller holidays in the season of celebration and anticipation. There was more material than we could cover in a single season, but I loved it so much I am not planning on moving on to a different book for some time. I expect as we use this book over the years the rhythms will become more and more familiar.

Church Calendar

This year I've been making an intentional effort to embrace the traditional holidays and celebrations. In our church tradition there is not much talk of the Church Calendar, other than the major holidays (Christmas, Easter). But as I learn more I've found so much rich church history to draw from. The Advent season this past year, for example, was such a joyful anticipation this year as we slowly, day-by-day checked off the days until we reached the Messiah's birth and All Joy broke out in glorious light!

I know this is an unseasonal time to write about Christmas on a blog, as proper blogging means writing about it in advance rather than after-the-fact, but I was busy savoring the season. And I want these thoughts to be available for next year.

My inspiration this year started with an advent devotional by Cindy Rollins. Cindy Rollins is a mom of 9 (8 boys!) who schooled her children at home and blogged about it through the process. You can find her blog here. Sadly, the paper copies of her advent book were sold out by the time I was ready to purchase it, but fortunately it was available on Kindle so I still was able to read it! My other inspiration for this year was a cookbook recommended in the back of her book, A Continual Feast. I think I'd like to give each of these books their own book review, so I will leave this here for now.

I'm going to write about several posts about different parts of the season this year, and update this post as a directory:
Hallelujah: A Journey Through Advent with Handles Messiah
A Continual Feast
St Nicolas Day--December 6
St. Lucy's Day--December 13