Pondered In My Heart

Lent Calendars 2020

Lydia has once again illustrated beautiful calendars for the upcoming season of Great Lent, one for the Eastern Rites and one for the Latin Rite. Young and old alike have enjoyed using these for many years. You can print them out and color a space a day as a visual reminder of our progress through the season.

*Please note: The numbers on the calendars are the numbered days of Lent, not calendar dates.

Download Lent 2020 Latin      Download Lent 2020 Byzantine

Please feel free to share with your parishes, homeschool groups, catechism and ECF classes, etc.

A blessed, holy Lent to all of you!

Menu Planner - Lenten Style

This is a printout that we use during Lent for planing our meals. I designed this one to include three unique features important for us: space for teatime snack, space for evening prep tasks (like soaking beans or starting sourdough), and listing Sunday as the first day of the week(!). A simple form, but I post it here in the event it may be useful to others. Also, we find it very helpful to keep our completed sheets from year to year to assist in planning Lenten meals.

Download Menu planner Lent

Lent Calendars 2019

Lydia has once again illustrated a beautiful calendar for the upcoming season of Lent, and this year she has made two: one for the Eastern Rites as well as one for the Latin!

Young and old alike have enjoyed using these for years. You can print them out and color a space a day as a visual reminder of our progress through the season.

Please feel free to share with your parishes, homeschool groups, catechism and ECF classes, or whomever you wish.

Download Lent 2019 Byzantine

Download Lent 2019 Latin

A few notes about the Great Fast for those of you in the Latin Rite who are curious about the East: As you can see, Lent starts on the Monday before Ash Wednesday. The First Sunday, called the Sunday of Orthodoxy, refers to the triumph over Iconoclasm and the restoration of the use of icons and holy images. There are five All Souls Saturdays (three occur in Lent) in which to commemorate and pray for the dead, as opposed to All Souls Day celebrated in November.

Lent Calendar 2018

Lydia has once again illustrated a calendar for the upcoming season of Lent! Young and old have enjoyed using this for years as a visual of the journey through the forty days. You can color or mark off a space each day as we make our way towards Holy Week and Easter. Seeing the daily progress is an encouragement to all.

Note that since the Annunciation falls on Palm Sunday this year, in the Latin Rite the feast is transferred to after Easter.

Please feel free to share with your homeschool groups, catechism classes, parishes, or whomever you wish.

Download Lent 2018 (C) PonderedInMyHeart

Celebrating Pascha

 

This year our traditions were a mix of old and new as we celebrated for the first time at our Byzantine Catholic Church. We made a lot of pysanky during Holy Week, something we hadn't done since my oldest children were little. Lydia decorated one of our homemade beeswax tapers for our Paschal candle. She used crayon melted in a kistka to apply the design and it worked like a charm (boiling water made quick work of cleaning up the kistka). I made my first hrudka, the traditional Eastern European egg cheese served on Easter bread. We enjoyed Slovak pascha baked by the church ladies (including my daughters), along with our traditional Hungarian kalacs. We jumped on the babka bandwagon and make some of those deliciously decadent loaves for the first time. Our customary piskota, nut and poppy rolls, rugelach, and bird nests rounded out our sweets with which to break the Great Fast and celebrate Easter.

Holy Saturday was spent cooking and baking as is our longstanding tradition, though we had to scurry a bit to get everything prepared before evening Liturgy and the blessing of the Pascha food baskets. This was a great thrill as we finally got to participate in this tradition that my mother and sister often speak of from their childhoods in ethnic churches. Anna Ruth embroidered a beautiful Pascha basket cover for us, and the older girls wore their traditional garb for the occasion. Mary Rose wore the Hungarian vest that Josiah made and Anna embroidered for her for Christmas - she had been waiting for the feast day to wear it for the first time. Father blesses the food baskets after Holy Saturday evening Liturgy and again on Easter morning; all the lovingly prepared special foods from the various ethnic traditions make a beautiful sight.

The Easter morning services begin with Resurrection Matins and a procession around the church in the brilliant sunshine, a stark contrast to Good Friday's nighttime procession with the Shroud in the dark. With the church bells ringing out, Father marks the door with the Cross and the troparion of Pascha is sung for the first time:

Christ is risen from the dead!
By death he trampled death
and to those in the tombs he granted life!

Christós voskrése iz mértvych,
smértiju smert' popráv,
i súščym vo hrobích živót darováv.

And we have been singing it seemingly incessantly ever since. With it the Resurrection is proclaimed in song many times throughout every Divine Liturgy, in numerous melodies, in various languages. Folks in my house hum it, whistle it, think it, sing it, back each other up in spontaneous harmonies, live it as it constantly courses through our minds and hearts and souls bringing Resurrection joy and peace and hope. Eliza goes out on the deck every day to sing it at the top of her lungs to the world at large. The reality of the empty tomb permeates and preoccupies our thoughts throughout these glorious triumphant days of Pascha. Holy Mother Church gives us fifty days to celebrate! May the joy of the risen Christ belong to you and yours as well. 

Christ is risen! Indeed He is risen!

Christos Voskrese!

Christ is risen!

Indeed He is risen!

Christos voskrese!

Voistinu voskrese!

Christ is risen!

Indeed He is risen!

A most happy, blessed Easter to all of you, from all of us!

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:11

Merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!

My two girls surprised me by learning Angels from Heaven in Hungarian for us for a Christmas gift. I'm sharing it here especially for Grammy (my mother), who used to sing it as a girl.

Festal Days of December: St. Nicholas

This past week we have been celebrating the Feast of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, patron of children, travelers, sailors, merchants, and the Byzantine Catholic Church. We put out our shoes the night before to find them filled with our usual simple treats of chocolate coins and our first candy canes and clementines of the season. Sometimes extra goodies are secretly tucked into shoes by Christkindls, and the little girls also found a new picture of the good saint to color. Mary Rose kindly shares her St. Nicholas Coloring Page here, with the Bishop pictured in traditional Byzantine style vestments: Download Saint Nicholas by MRK 2016-12-06 (c) ponderedinmyheart

We like a big pot of cocoa for feast day breakfasts, and it went very nicely with these Harvest Pumpkin Scones, studded with as much chrystallized ginger as you can bear to chop up (plus a little more) and the clementines. Janey was overjoyed to get some of these homemade dog biscuits for her treat. (They looked so good folks would be tempted to eat them on fast days if it weren't for the parsley.)

At teatime I read aloud Kersti and St. Nicholas by Hilda van Stockum, a new favorite tradition since we first got the book a few years ago. While the "new edition has been abridged and adapted by the author's family to make it more accessible to young readers of today," we naturally had to obtain a copy of the original hardcover picture book. Though there are indeed some things that would not pass muster by today's PC standards, it is delightful to read the text as it was written by the author. There are more pictures and verses, the ending is slightly different, and Kersti's doll goes by Fat Girlie (imagine!). Anna found a real Dutch doll in her shoe too.

We also made a boatload of these pierniczki, traditional Polish honey spice cakes, to bring and share at the church's festive brunch today in honor of St. Nicholas. We used the Janina's Piernik recipe found here -scroll down the page for the recipe along with a picture of the traditional icing pattern. Josiah made a wonderful St. Nicholas cookie cutter for me and it worked perfectly for the cookies. The kitchen smelled amazing last night as Lydia boiled the honey and spices together, and the resulting fragrant dough was lovely to work with. We used this recipe for the icing - my first time making royal icing! We just bought a carton of pasteurized egg whites for the recipe and it worked beautifully. The cookies turned out delicious and taste very similar to the decorated Hungarian Mézeskalács I remember so well from childhood.

O Saint Nicholas, bountiful  Father and special Patron of our Byzantine Catholic Church. You are a shepherd and teacher to all who invoke your protection, and who, by devout prayer, call upon you for aid. Hasten and save the flock of Christ from ravenous wolves; and by your holy prayers protect all Christians and save them from worldly disturbances, earthquakes, attacks from abroad, from internal strife, from famine, flood, fire, sword, and sudden death. As you had mercy on those three men in prison and saved them from the king's wrath, now also have mercy on me who by word, deed, and thought have sunk into the darkness of sin. Save me from the just anger of God, and from eternal punishment. Through your intercession and aid as well as through his own mercy and grace, may Christ our God allow me to lead a tranquil and sinless life, and save me from standing at "his left," but deem me worthy to stand at "his right" with all the saints. Amen.

Holy Father Nicholas (O kto kto)

O who loves Nicholas the Saintly,

O who serves Nicholas the Saintly,

Him will Nicholas receive,

And give help in time of need,

Holy Father Nicholas!

O who dwells in God's holy mansions,

Is our help on the lands and oceans.

He will guard us from all ills,

Keep us pure and free from sins,

Holy Father Nicholas!

Saint Nicholas, pray for us who love you,

O Father, humbly we beseech you.

We will always praise your name,

Your great deeds we will proclaim,

Forever, forever!

Happy, Blessed Feast of St. Nicholas to you and yours!

A Treat for the Feast: Mock Tail for St. George

April 23rd is the feast of St. George the martyr, patron of England and of soldiers. In the Eastern rite Churches he is known by the illustrious title of the Holy Great Martyr George the Wonder-Worker and he is also one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. One famous legend regarding St. George refers to his slaying of a dragon, thus we commemorated his feast day with a dragon themed treat.

We gave our treat a Tolkien twist by making Mock Dragon's Tail Cake as described in Farmer Giles of Ham:

It was still the custom for Dragon's Tail to be served up at the King's Christmas Feast; and each year a knight was chosen for the duty of hunting. He was supposed to set out upon St. Nicholas' Day and come home with a dragon's tail not later than the eve of the feast. But for many years now the Royal Cook had made a marvellous confection, a Mock Dragon's Tail of cake and almond-paste, with cunning scales of hard icing-sugar. The chosen knight then carried this into the hall on Christmas Eve, while the fiddles played and the trumpets rang. The Mock Dragon's Tail was eaten after dinner on Christmas Day, and everybody said (to please the cook) that it tasted much better than Real Tail.

While Christmas Eve is too busy of a time for us to make Dragon's Tail, the feast of St. George seemed like a very good day. Eliza was quite excited as our chosen knight carried the Mock Tail into the hall, er kitchen, while a trumpet fanfare was indeed played.

The girls made two classic cake rolls using jelly-roll pans, then filled each of them with a cylinder of homemade almond paste (for the bone), adding a bit of cherry preserve (for the blood). They put the two together, trimming the end to shape it like Tail. They made delicious, buttery homemade fondant to form the 'hard icing-sugar scales', tinting it with just a bit of raspberry juice, which gave it a delicate touch of raspberry flavor as well.

We didn't say it just to please the cook - we really did think it tasted much better than Real Tail.

O God, who dost gladden us by the merits and intercession of blessed George, Thy Martyr, mercifully grant that we, who ask for Thy blessing through him, may obtain them by the gift of Thy grace. - Collect, Commemoration of St. George