I've given one planner over completely to meal-planning. Maybe it would would better within my 'bullet journal', but I feel like it would take up too much space, unnecessarily. I already have another planner with areas for each meal and a grocery list, a water counter, and the daily readings from Mass. It all fits together so well.
We read the Mass readings aloud at breakfast, as the start to our school-day, our day is bookended in Scripture, my husband reads aloud at bed time as well. Right now, Isaiah precedes The Wizard of Oz.
Meal planning comes naturally to me, I love doing writing it all down and seeing the week
progress on paper. Living out my plans, is a constant struggle. I'm lazy or distracted, or else I forget entirely to go shopping and my plans are abandoned. But as we transition to a more intentional life, meal planning is essential. I want our meals to mean something, to be times of communion as a family. Acts of hospitality and love. I also need them to be healthy, sustaining, and frugal. All my intentions, existing together demand a primarily plant-based diet. A monastic table, rich in the living things we can grow, harvest, and grow again.
I'm writing out the coming weeks meal-plans, and to keep track of how we're progressing towards our monastic table..I mark each meal with a notation to indicate vegan, vegetarian, or meaty. Only the meals on Sundays or feast days are meaty, and my goal is that out of the 21 meals in a week, 10 will be without animal products (excluding honey, which seems both penitential and hospitable). It's easier than expected, but writing out goals always is..living them is another thing entirely.
I would love to hear your mealtime goals, and what inspired them! Blessings.
We celebrated the feast of St. Joseph yesterday! With cream, and cheese, and squid. It was absolutely amazing. St. Joseph got his prominent place at the table, with bread and salt around him, candles, and a little silk bird to call in the springtime.
I've really been thinking this year, especially after all the Catholic negativity toward St. Valentine's day. Why do we neglect our own feast days - St. Joseph's , St. Valentines' - in favor of greeting-card holidays? I've never been particularly passionate about Mother's and Father's Day. Mother's Day tends toward the sappy and Father's Day is too often just pathetic. Another excuse for women to remind their husbands just how much less than motherhood they value fatherhood.
But St. Joseph's day has the potential to be a richer 'father's' day. A time to bless the men in our lives with love and honor, and not just the fathers. St. Joseph is a universal patron: of men, of families, of workers, of virgins, of the church. His day is a celebration of a good man's life - a life lived in obedience to God. It's the calling of every man. Father's day is for father's only, but our lives are full of men deserving a feast of their own. Husbands, brothers, friends - men who may or may not ever have children of their own, but who - like St. Joseph - have turned their lives into living Icons.
So we set up the table, and set out some gifts. I'd intended to give gifts to Seth, but Yarrow seemed to think that on our family patron's day, we ought all get gifts, so we did. Little gifts for her and me, and a larger one for our man.
We put the presents on the altar - Yarrow's present on her own little altar, and when Seth came home from work we opened them, drank coffee with cream, and feasted on good food and a quiet night together. Then we prayed the Litany of St. Joseph before bed, and left the Icon's candle burning through the night, to keep the dark at bay and bless the transition back from feast to fast.
How do you celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph?
