Holy Week

I will apologize in advance for the poor quality of some of these pictures. We have had a good week (so glad Daddy is home!). Right when Charlie came back we started into Holy Week. I was talking to a lady at our church a month or so ago. She mentioned that her family was planning a big celebration for Easter. She said, "Easter really should be a much bigger celebration than anything else throughout the year." I totally agreed with her. It is when we celebrate our Savior, rising from the dead, defeating death on our behalf. So, I got to thinking about how we could make Easter more of a celebration. I decided we should do Holy Week devotions. I kinda came up with a little devo for our family to do each morning. I was able to take various ideas from different Holy Week devotionals that I saw online. What we do each morning is read a passage from scripture that deals with the last week of Jesus' life. Our passage this morning was from when Christ took passover with his disciples and then went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. I made a twiggy little cross from sticks in the yard (it's a pathetic little thing, our yard is still covered in snow and sticks were not abundant!). I printed off 7 little pictures to go with the scripture passages that we used. Each day, Callie picks the appropriate picture and hangs it on the little cross. Also, we are using little tea lights. On Palm Sunday we had 5 tea lights lit. Each day, starting with Monday we would snuff out one light and the following day light one less light. On Friday, when we read the passage of the crucifixion, we will snuff out the last candle. It will be all dark to represent Jesus' death. Saturday we will have no lights lit. On Sunday morning, all 5 will be lit again representing His rise from the dead.

We also decided to celebrate this week by baking treats for people in the neighborhood. I bought one of those mini muffin tins and we made almond poppyseed sweet bread. We took it to 4 or 5 different families. We taped a note on top of the bread package that said "celebrating Jesus, the Risen Savior" We wanted to encourage others (who may or may not believe) to think about Christ this week.

Callie helped with the baking and this guy helped with the tasting.