Review: Celebrating Saints and Seasons

This review comes from my wife, Christiane Little, who is a Catholic homeschooling mom of four. She's very crafty (in a good way :) ) and likes to do projects with the kids, so it seemed like a good fit.

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Celebrating Saints and Seasons, by Jeanne Hunt

I didn’t really like this book initially. Firstly, this is not a craft book. There are no coloring pages or neat little patterns for ornaments. Instead, there are ideas, ranging from simple, like using flower stickers to create a Lenten countdown calendar, to more challenging projects, like planning a New Year’s campout. Organized by month, the book offers suggestions for seasonal celebrations like Earth Day and Thanksgiving as well as memorials of Saints and other heroes like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. There’s a wealth of material, a boon to anyone finding themselves short of ideas.   

The book did grow on me after a bit. However, there are features that I find less useful. The “prayers” in each section are basically (sometimes overly flowery) prose poems. They may work well for personal meditation for the parent and educator—a number of them, to be fair, are thoughtful and/or beautiful – but will not appeal to nor be appreciated by most children.

The other feature that I found unappealing was the inclusion of guided meditations and pseudo-liturgies for home and possibly school use. These might work with a group of teens or pre-teens, but I doubt they would be very enthusiastic about them. The points made in the course of these rituals would be more likely to make an impression if presented in a less formulaic way.   

Overall, I’d recommend this volume to anyone looking to plan engaging activities with a Catholic slant for kids and family. It’s definitely geared towards adults, not kids, though. These aren’t ready-made projects; most require some degree of planning. However, with a little imagination, parents and educators will find plenty of ways to use the material presented here to enrich their lives and the lives of the children they work with.

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Thanks to the Catholic Company for sharing this book with me. As part of the FTC rules, I have to be clear that they gave this book to us in order to elicit a review. The Catholic Company is also a great source for first communion gifts and baptism gifts.

Tradition Is Progressive

It’s a common misconception that “tradition” and “traditional” is somehow backwards looking or simply conservative. It’s not.

‘Tradition’ comes from the Latin traditio, the noun of the verb tradere, ‘to transmit’, ‘to deliver’. It was a term of ratification in Roman law: for example, the legal transfer of a shop or house was accompanied by the act of handing over its keys, traditio clavium; the sale of a piece of land was accompanied by the act of handing over a clod of earth. Tradere, traditio meant “to hand over an object”, with the intention, on the one hand, of parting with it, and, on the other, of acquiring it. Tradere implied giving over and surrendering something to someone, passing an object from the possession of the donor to the receiver... An equally good simile would be that of a relay race, where the runners, spaced at intervals, pass an object from one to the other...
    from The Meaning of Tradition by Fr. Yves Congar, O.P.

Tradition is not something for your grandparents. It’s not wistful nostalgia for the past. It is, in brief, what enables us to keep moving forward, to keep expanding and enhancing our knowledge about things, to progress--it’s progressive, not conservative. Whether or not you like it, essentially everything you have had taught to you is a kind of tradition, and that is A Good Thing.

Of course, not all traditions are good or perennially helpful. Each of us has to evaluate what is given to us and assign it value, but I’m just saying we shouldn’t discount tradition just because it was handed down to us, i.e., not dismiss things out of hand because they are “traditional.” I would even go further to suggest that we might want to implicitly give traditional knowledge more value than something we discover on our own until we have plenty of evidence to recommend another course precisely because it is something that those who came before us thought was valuable enough to hand on to us.

In other words, I’m suggesting we not reinvent the wheel if we don’t have to. What our parents and grandparents (and theirs and theirs and theirs) hand on to us should have implicit value for us, to help us to not start from scratch, to learn from their experience and mistakes, and to, as Sir Isaac Newton and others have said, see a little bit further than they by standing on the shoulders of giants. We should value tradition because it enables us to be truly progressive.