Holy Week Prepare for Easter With Your Family
Editor's Notation: This is Part II in a series on jubilant Lent and Easter. To read Part I, click here.
Traditions -- especially those children can see, hear, experience, smell and taste -- provide vivid impressions on which parents tin build year later on year. There are many which will enrich your own family'due south celebration of what might exist more accurately chosen Resurrection Twenty-four hour period. Choose a few from this collection, share their pregnant in whatsoever words your children will sympathise, and go on the ones y'all like equally part of your family unit's Easter heritage.
Holy Calendar week
11) Resurrection Eggs (TM): An egg carton filled with a dozen plastic eggs, each containing a symbol of the Holy Week. Accompanied past twelve cursory kid-friendly lessons. Make them yourself with directions from http://www.rainbowcastle.org/resurrectioneggs.html or order from FamilyLife Ministries.
12) Palm Sun: If your church doesn't make much of Palm Sun, you might consider just one time attending i that does. For an in-dwelling house celebration, read Matthew ii:ane-eleven together. If you have a large family or a few friends, you can put together costumes and act out Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem.
13) Seeds: Seeds offer a clear message to children of the power of new life. Rest eggshell halves filled with soil in egg carton. Constitute a marigold, petunia, or grapefruit seed in each (or even grass seed for fastest results). Place in sunny window.
14) Art Museums: The Passion of Christ is the near-portrayed subject of Western artists. If you live in a metropolitan area, a visit to your local art museum may requite your family much to ponder.
fifteen) Housecleaning: Wednesday of Holy Week has been a traditional day in many countries for housecleaning -- from the Jewish custom of cleaning before Passover.
16) Passover: Each year more Christians are drawn to gloat Passover, the feast commemorating the departure of the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 12). Jesus had come up to Jerusalem to celebrate and was actually crucified on Passover Twenty-four hour period. He is the fulfillment of this tradition, as our ain Passover Lamb. For more information on connecting the One-time and New Testaments in this way, visit Introduction to a Christian Seder: Recovering Passover for Christians.
17) Foot Washing: This Maundy Thursday event speaks volumes about Jesus's desire for us to serve. Read John 13. Wrap a towel around your waist, as Jesus did, and launder your children's feet. Your lives might never be the same.
Good Friday
18) Three Hours: Observe Jesus' crucifixion past reading the Biblical business relationship together. Sing erstwhile hymns of the Crucifixion and the Cross: "Were You At that place When They Crucified My Lord?" "The One-time Rugged Cantankerous," "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." Near Catholic churches offer Stations of the Cantankerous, fourteen plaques circling the interior walls which draw the final hours of Jesus' life. Yous may want to visit and contemplate these, one by i.
19) Hot Cross Buns: Traditional Skilful Friday fare for the family unit to make and eat together.
Saturday of Holy Week
20) The Passion: Watch Mel Gibson'south portrayal of Jesus's final hours with older children (warning: graphic but realistic violence). If your children are younger, If your children are younger, scout the Jesus Pic Project's beautifully-crafted evangelical flick, scripted just with words from the Gospel of Luke.
Easter Sunday
21) Easter Greeting: Greet each other with "Alleluia, the Lord is risen!" and respond "He is risen indeed!"
22) Sunrise Service: Attend i offered by a church building, or climb a hill with your family, worship together, and share a picnic breakfast.
23) Special music: Mind together to Sandi Patti's moving "Was information technology a Morning Like This?" Listen once again. Discuss how it must have felt to see our risen Lord. Was anyone who saw him e'er the same? Jesus said those who believe without having seen are blest (John xx:29).
24) New dress: New converts were traditionally baptized at Easter, wearing new white garments to symbolize their new life. If your family has new Easter outfits, share with your children where this tradition came from.
Somewhere in the Easter celebration, you may exist coloring eggs and visiting relatives. Eggs then can become subtle way of sharing the Proficient News of Jesus Christ. Like seeds, eggs are very much a symbol of new life. Traditionally they were also a symbol of Easter joy considering they were a forbidden particular during Lent. Nowadays, dyed to take to grandmother'due south for an annual Easter egg hunt (as our family unit does each twelvemonth) they can deport all manner of blithesome letters.
Share with nonbelieving relatives and friends what your family is doing for Easter this year -- perchance next year they'll bring together in.
Whatsoever traditions you continue, remember that for believers Easter is a celebration that really never ends.
Brand It Existent for Petty Ones
Young children are not abstract thinkers. To learn, they need to meet. Experiences like growing seeds or bulbs give them a concrete image, providing a bridge into the abstract concept of new life.
Easter Diorama
Books with lots of pictures are a must for children to sympathize Jesus' decease and Resurrection. For preschoolers, go piece of cake on the torturous events leading to the Crucifixion as they could exist besides intense and upsetting. Concentrate on the tomb -- finding it empty holds a lot of drama for children.
For even more than excitement, make the story three-dimensional.
Using clay or papier mache, construct a tomb and a rock. Create a scene, as simple or elaborate equally y'all wish, of Jesus' burial site. Make or look through the toybox for plastic figures to represent Jesus and the guards. Wrap Jesus in a shroud (gauze from the medicine cabinet is perfect), place him in the tomb on Friday. Scroll the stone in front of the opening of the tomb, using appropriate vocalizations to show how heavy information technology is. At present station the guards in front. No one is to touch the stone, although with the children's help, the guards may march back and forth to stretch their legs.
On Easter morn the children should find that during the night the stone was rolled abroad. The guards are lying outside the tomb, the gauzy shroud is inside, but Jesus is gone!
Read whichever Biblical account fits your children's ages or attention spans -- some gospels have more information than others. So "observe" the Jesus figure nearby. At present the words take significant:"He is risen!" "He is risen indeed!"
Barbara Curtis has 12 children - including three adopted sons with Down's syndrome - and 10 grandchildren and then far. She is besides an accolade-winning author with nine books and 800+ articles in print publications including Focus on the Family, Guideposts, Christian Parenting Today, and The Washington Times.
Barbara is a popular speaker at MOPS and women's events, every bit well as writers' conferences. Online yous tin find her at MommyLife and Mommy, Teach Me! .
Source: https://www.crosswalk.com/special-coverage/easter/15-ways-to-observe-holy-week-with-your-family-11570532.html
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