Happy St Valentine's Day in our Home -2012

Well once again we had a feast day to celebrate. If it is one thing I enjoy about our Catholic Faith it is the absolute ability to make it special in the every day. Of course this means many feast days through out the year, celebrations of the Saints, those who have lived their lives for God in a way we can emulate. To balance this though we are given many opportunities to reflect and draw closer to God through abstinence, giving more of one self and sacrifice....Lent starts next week you know and I am pondering how best to apply the opportunities available to my self as well as a family 'gift'

Our celebrations were not spectacular or very food orientated and quite frankly the crafts I had planned for St Valentine were no where in existence.
However we did achieve a few ideas to help remember the life of St Valentine.

We had our Valentine  Walnut Shell gifts -- tutorial here courtesy of our Eden girl

This idea I am not really how to explain it but the clear plastic heart has everyone's names on heart shaped pieces of cardboard. What I was trying to capture was the heart of the family holding everyone's individual hearts  together in one special embrace. Kinda corny huh?

On our bookcase display (the whole St Valentine Display is in the first picture) I wanted to decorate the candle quickly so I cut out some of our candle decorating wax sheets(we have had these for some years and it has lasted quite well) so hearts of course are quick and simple to cut and apply to the candle.

Getting out our Valentines day books is a great pleasure as we usually add these Tasha Tudor books to our display as well.

I read aloud from  Saint Valentine, Love is....  and Little Acts of Kindness as the younger children coloured in these colouring pictures:

Colouring pages we used~
cut out card
Boy posting card
St Valentine - Charlotte ( I love this one)
St Valentine- illuminated ink
St Valentine and this one too
Boy and Girl
Boy and dog
Cute Bunny (our little girls loved this one)
Boy and girl holding hands

The vestments for St Valentine on Father Pine are red, this is the other end of our bookcase display.

We did set up our Valentines Tree that we have each year as well as our Heart Pockets. The ideas for this are explained in this post from last year

This year our lack of ability to get out and  get supplies fo rthis means we really only started this today and the little ones have been filling pockets with lots of pictures and love letters.  AS we only started today we will keep this circle of love going until the start of Lent.

Just the bookcase display, notice the untidy bookcase, I hadn't really until Eden so carefully  pointed out to me, thanks sweety.

For the All Seasons wreath I wanted to keep it simple so cut our multiple layers of both pink tissue paper and red cellophane and threaded them through with thread, fluffed them up a bit and put them on the wreath.

Simple yet effective I think!!

Of course we had to put up our Valentine Ribbon Banner

Arwen was fascinated by it this year and kept trying to tug at the sculpy hearts, she loved them so much.

Here is the "LOVE" banner that we put up for the first time last year. If you look carefully you can see the Valentine Ribbon banner and the Seasons wreath in the back ground of the room behind.

I was so impressed that Vellvin wanted to cut both eh carrots and chicken pieces into heart shapes. This took a long time to do but she was very diligent with it. I think they look so cute!

I love the way the hearts look on our dinner plate. We had the heart shape cake (pictured above) that Rogan made earlier, for sweets. Our heart shaped sugar cookies that Saxon was making (still in dough form today even....hmm when can we have these Saxon?)

That pretty much wrapped up our celebrations for the day. I hope you enjoyed your own day as well.

Prayer t St Valentine -
O glorious advocate and protector,
St Valentine,
look with pity upon our wants,
hear our requests,
attend to our prayers,
relieve by your intercession the miseries
under which we labour,
and obtain for us the divine blessing,
that we may be found worthy to join you
in praising the Almighty for all
eternity: through the merits of
Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessings to you and your homes,