Featured Speaker - Alice Gunther
Alice Gunther is an attorney who gave up practicing law over a dozen years ago to nurture and home educate her seven children, now ages thirteen to one. She writes about Catholic family life at her weblog, Cottage Blessings, and writes a column for The Long Island Catholic called “The Catholic Home.”
For the past nine years, Alice has run a popular Catholic Children’s Club, celebrating the Liturgical Year through crafts, prayer, stories of saints and scripture, and “Liturgical Teas.” The Teas feature symbolic menu offerings to tell the underlying stories of faith, teaching children and adults in a unique and memorable way.
She is currently working on two books about home education and catechesis.
Scheduled talks:
A Garden Well Tended: Living the Liturgical Year in the Catholic Home
Following the pattern set out for the year by our beautiful Mother Church, parents are like gardeners sowing seeds of faith in the fertile hearts of children. This talk will show how prayer, family tradition, and happy memories take root during childhood, blossoming into a deep and lifelong love for our Faith.
What about Socialization?
Far from being the weakness of home education, socialization is its greatest strength and joy! Catholic homeschooling leads to deep friendships, not only for the children, but for parents as well, supporting the family in the life of Faith. This talk will introduce a “Fatima Model” for homeschool gatherings and offer advice for planning a variety of clubs and activities. Most of all, it will show how Christ is at the center of every homeschool venture for, as He promised, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”
If you have friends or family members wondering about the social lives of Catholic homeschoolers, please bring them along for this practical and reassuring talk by the author of the upcoming book, Haystack Full of Needles: A Catholic Home Educator’s Guide to Socialization.
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A Sampling of Alice’s wit and wisdom:
Saints of the Season
by Alice Gunther
October 04, 2006: As the vibrant greens of summer give way to glints of gold, the Church has blessed us with a bounty of saints’ day celebrations, each one flickering like a candle in a long procession marching ever onward toward the great feast of All Hallows on November 1. This week alone, we rejoiced with the Archangels, St. Padre Pio, St. Therese of Lisieux, the Guardian Angels, and now St. Francis of Assisi. In the coming days and weeks, we will pray to Our Lady of the Rosary and give thanks for the lives of St. Faustina, St. Gerard Majella, and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, to name but a few.
As with all works of the Spirit, the timing of these feasts is no accident. October’s flood of festivities calls the saints to our minds and hearts each and every day, inviting us to pause and ponder these great souls as the perfect preparation for All Saint’s Day.
Our crafts can help us to get ready as well. This unassuming little bag of wooden ice cream spoons is just waiting to sing the praises of the heavenly court.
A few odds and ends are all that is needed–markers and some scrapbooking paper, although construction paper would work just as well.
The great thing about saints’ crafts is that it is easy to make almost any saint recognizable just by including certain symbols.
St. Therese wears the habit of a Carmelite and carries the crucifix adorned by roses.
Good St. Francis appears in a friar’s robe with a beard and tonsure and bearing the wounds of the stigmata. Of course, a sweet little bird alights on his shoulder, a reminder of Francis’ affinity toward animals and his famous “Sermon to the Birds”.
A collection of these small and simple saints would make a pleasing and kid-friendly display for the Feast of All Saints. Just imagine what your children could create if they collected these for a year!
The girls and I spent a quiet half hour crafting more saints’ dolls, each of us using our own imaginations to portray a favorite saint. Theresa and I both worked on St. Faustina to celebrate her feast. Drawing inspiration from a portrait on a holycard, I began by cutting out a simple habit in two pieces:
St. Faustina’s gorgeous veil begged for a more three dimensional treatment. By folding a strip of cardstock into thirds and snipping the front in two places before folding it, the base of her veil began to take shape.
The photo above shows the white base before I turned it around and glued it to the “forehead” of the spoon in the photo below. Two neat triangular folds on either side captured the look of St. Faustina’s headpiece:
A strip of dark cardstock folded in three places, draped over the top of the head and snipped and folded in the back supplied her veil. I am using my thumb in the picture below to hold down the first rear fold as the glue dries:
In the end the back should look something like the photo above. One more piece of dark cardstock covering the back of her skirt would make the doll reversible.
Here is the finished product. (Placing the doll in front of a Divine Mercy image seemed like a perfect finishing touch):
Speaking of finishing touches, I decided to have some fun by writing on the pages inside St. Faustina’s little book:
If all that paper folding for St. Faustina’s veil is too complicated for your young ones, consider eleven-year-old Theresa’s simplified, but no less attractive and recognizable, version:
When the girls and I craft together, we usually run with a common idea, but our finished products are always different. Below is six-year-old Marie’s version of the St. Faustina doll. In person, her headpiece is three dimensional.
St. Faustina, pray for us!
The procession grows:
I wish I could express to you how it gladdens my heart to see this procession of saints take shape upon the mantel!
Theresa (11) made her favorite saint, St. Gianna Molla. If you look carefully, you will note that she is holding her newborn baby in her arms:
This is Margaret’s (9) rendering of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, wearing royal robes and carrying bread and roses in a basket over her arm. Yellow embroidery floss forms the curls cascading down her back.
Marie (6) created St. Francis and St. Padre Pio:
Agnes (12) added her patrons, St. Jude and St. Agnes:
Here is Margaret’s (9) partially completed Blessed Mother, inspired by Our Lady of Guadalupe:
Margaret also tried her hand at fashioning her own version of St. Francis and his friend, St. Clare. I love St. Clare’s monstrance and the brown embroidery floss cords Margaret fastened to their waists:
Here is Marie’s (6) representation of St. Philomena, shown here with an anchor and palm leaf:
And these are our St. Kateri Tekakwithas, created by Theresa (11) and Margaret (9). Theresa added feet to hers, accounting for the height difference. Margaret was disappointed that the face of her doll became smudged. I reminded her that St. Kateri had smallpox, so her face would have had scarring. When she died, the scars disappeared and she was found radiant, earning her the nickname, “Lily of the Mohawks.”
This article is a compilation of posts from Alice’s blog, Cottage Blessings
