All Saints

Find a way to celebrate the feast today. And don't forget about the plenary indulgence you can earn for the souls in purgatory.

After All Soul's tomorrow, I'm going to get started on Christmas stuff! I can't believe it's November already. Here's what we have been up to:

All Saints Parade at School Zooey's St. Charles Borromeo costume turned out remarkably well. He looked convincingly like a mini-cardinal. I did the whole thing (rapidly) out of thrift-store sheets. Starting with the surplice, I cut the white into two big shirt shapes and stiched those together, then added a long red rectangle, slightly gathered about an inch above the bottom hem, so it looked like he had a red cassock underneath. For the mozzetta, I cut a big circle of red and put a hole in the middle and layered that over the top (think elbow-length poncho). I thought the zuchetto (hat) would be really hard, but I got it on the first try -- I just put plastic wrap over Zooey's baseball hat, traced one section, and then cut out six pieces of red sheet and stitched them together with a little loop of fabric in the middle. Hemmed up the bottom & it was quite convincing. The school took a photo and submitted it to the Catholic paper, and boy was Zooey proud of that! He didn't smile for any of the photos, and when I asked him way, he said, "St. Charles Borromeo never smiled because he was too busy thinking about Jesus on the Cross."

Halloween pretty much went off without a hitch, the only casualties being four rather large holes in Edyn's church dress (caused by safety pins and my over-developed sense of optism -- "What could happen?" was what I was thinking. A ruined church dress!) and Lola's anger/frustrations/tantrums over (1) not being allowed to go trick-or-treating with the bigger kids (Daddy's rule, not mine!), (2) not being allowed to eat candy until she puked, and (3) having to live with the time change. When Zooey got home, he washed off his skeleton face paint and slipped on his St. Charles costume so that he could go to the rectory to trick-or-treat again. A bit of a show-off, I've got there, but at least he likes to play 'saint.'

--Sparki