Planning St. Michael’s Feast Day Tea: A Resource Round-Up

image from Wikimedia

This year I re-committed to celebrating family Name Days and Baptism Anniversaries.  At the end of the week, another one is coming up:  Daddy’s Name Day, St. Michael’s Feast Day.

In case anyone else is planning to celebrate St. Michael this week, I thought I would share a round-up of resource ideas for Michalemas,  just like I when we were planning our Assumption of Mary Feast Day Celebration.  Enjoy browsing is collection of festive ideas and be sure to add comments in the links to favorite ways to celebrate St. Michael that I may have missed.

Decoration

• Place orange and/or gold candles on the table, as they are the traditional colors of St. Michael.
• If we can find some, a bouquet of Michaelmas daisies (asters) would be lovely..
• Make a Michael the Archangel centerpiece envisioned by the kids.

Tea Time Fare

• Since Michaelmas falls around apple picking time and cider was traditionally brewed at this time of year, we will likely enjoy both cold and hot apple cider (as my children prefer cold drinks to hot and are still not tea-drinkers).  
• For simplicity sake, we might just enjoy sliced apples.
• For Mama, blackberry herbal tea will be in order, since legend has it that when St. Michael’s expelled Lucifer from Heaven, he fell from the skies to earth, straight onto a blackberry bush, whereupon he cursed the fruit, stamped on it and then spat on it, making them unfit to eat after Michaelmas!
• Fresh blackberries, defrosted frozen blackberries, blackberry cobbler or blackberry muffins may be in order, too.
• According to custom, women once harvested wild carrots for Michaelmas by digging triangular holes (to represent St. Michael’s shield) with a three-pronged mattock (to represent St. Michael’s) trident, so to get a little produce power into our tea, we will try agave-glazed carrot rounds.
• For fun, we will likely make devil’s food cake or cupcakes to stab with plastic swords.
• Likewise, perhaps some stabbed deviled eggs.
• Traditionally, goose was eaten on Michaelmas in the UK.  Since we cannot get goose, we may have some bits of chicken on toothpicks.
• Perhaps make some Margherita (daisy) cake, a tradition in Italy, adapted from this GF recipe.
• If we decide to do a breakfast tea, I’ll adapt a recipe for St. Michael’s Gaufres to a GFCF recipe.
• If we decide to do a dinner tea, gnocchi would be an option since it is also an Italian Michaelmas tradition.
• Maybe try a version of Michaelmas Pie, inspired by the one part way down this page.

Prayer

• Color and learn with the printable coloring page and prayer at CHC.
• Pray to St. Michael.
• Print out the Prayer Card here and join the campaign.

Activities

• Color Waltzing Matilda’s St. Michael coloring page or Paper Dali’s one.

• Perhaps for a sensory experience we can make mini-pillows with store-bought feathers based on the idea that “geese were fed the last remnants of the grain harvest to fatten them for Michaelmas.  The down plucked from them was used to stuff pillows and mattresses, so this practice became associated with Michaelmas as well.” (from http://home.earthlink.net/~mysticalrose/michaelm.html)
• Perhaps make and play a card game based on St. Michael’s patronage.

Plus, for my own study, I hope to find time to slowly read through Women for Faith and Family’s The Church and the Holy Angels page, as well as their comprehensive, yet concise page on the Archangels Feast Day.  (I know that my description of the page is a bit of an oxymoron, but it is the best way I can explain the relatively brief, yet complete collection of readings, excerpts prayers, etc that the page offers.)

Of course, as with all of our Feast Day celebrations and teas, what we actually do will be up to the way both the day, and the children's ideas, unfold.  However our festivities turn out, I am sure they will be fun.

What are some of your favorite St. Michael resources?  Do you have favorite angel crafts?

 

(If you receive this post via email and cannot see the linky, be sure to actually click over to the blog to read browse the rich catalog of ideas there.)

 
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