Lenten Activities for Your Family, pt. 1

Lent is such a special time of the year!  It gives us a chance to do some spiritual spring cleaning, to figure out what we are lacking and work on it.  It helps us let go of the things weighing us down and remember the things that we should do to build ourselves up, all so that we can become closer to and reconnect with God.

I inevitably find that I can dive into Lent too much, with all of these ideas for myself and the kids, that a few weeks in, I'm burned out!  There are TONS of great ideas out there, just do an internet search on 'Catholic lenten activities for kids' and you'll see what I mean.  If you are looking to add something for Lent that you can't find here or at church, by all means, do that.  However sometimes less really is more.  I'd encourage you to pick two or three really meaningful ideas for your family and stick with those.  Decide what will work for you on your journey of faith, and go with that.

That being said, I'm going to post several ideas for Lent over the next few days.  I'd love for you to try some of them, but again, choose what works, and don't worry about what won't.  Have a wonderful and prayerful Lent.  So, idea #1:

This is our buffet, with the purple napkins hiding a fun and festive Easter village!

Decorate for Easter:  Okay, hear me out.  What we do in our house is decorate early, so that it is done.  We then cover all the decorations with purple, not to be uncovered until Easter morning.  This is a ton of fun for the kids, and it allows us to stay in the Lent/Holy Week mindset until it is actually Easter.

The thing is, I want the house to be full of Easter when it finally arrives, but I want the children to understand the differences between the seasons, and the reasons for these differences.  I wouldn't be able to clean and decorate in a day, plus put all the Lenten things away, so this gives us a way to clean throughout Lent, and then cover things so that our house still looks like Lent, but we are ready for Easter!  Anything purple will do the trick- napkins, plastic tablecloths, or burlap would work well too.

I decorate specifically for Lent in some parts of the house as well, and this photo might give you some ideas.  This is a simple contemplative area that I set up for Lent.  We participate in the Rice Bowl every year, so I fill a bowl with rice for the kids to touch and to hopefully remember that many children around the world only have rice to eat.  The boys made a cross out of twigs tied with pipe cleaner, and we anchored that in a cup full of rice and draped the cup in purple.  We added the rice bowl donation box, our own bowl of rice, rocks and some votive candles.  This picture was taken near St. Patrick's Day last year, so the Irish blessing frame is there as well.