Holy Thursday 2016: Lenten Tea

When I first started blogging, I was eager to share my ideas with other moms. I was eager to inspire other moms to get more involved and celebrate the liturgies of the Church in our homes. I love to celebrate holidays and liturgical events. With this in mind, I quickly found plenty of other blogger moms who had plenty of ideas to share with me as well. I have referenced Catholic All Year, Sole Searching Mama, and Sometimes Martha Always Mary, as three of these such bloggers.

Let me begin by saying that I love Holy Week. I try to set up my week by having Wednesday and Thursday be my cleaning and purging days. I wrap up all my schoolwork with the children on Wednesday. The children and I spend Holy Thursday cleaning our house and preparing for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday! I usually run the remainder of my errands, and compile my lists of things to do for each day. I like the concept of having one or two “big” events for each day as a way to extend Holy Week.

Holy Thursday= Lenten Tea and the Washing of the Feet

A few years ago I was introduced to the concept of a Lenten Tea by the blog, Shower of Roses. You can read about that here.

A Lenten Tea sounded like the perfect way to teach the little children the story of Holy Thursday by partaking in food that would remind us of the Last Supper. This has become a beloved tradition in our home and every year we change it up a little.

Here are our pictures from this year:

A small “tip” for moms of toddlers or wild boys…haha. I purchased a nice china tea pot that had about four pretty tea cups that I used when I had friends over for tea. As you can tell in the picture above, I would also grab tea cups from Goodwill and Thrift shops when I found them for my little kids to use. There is nothing worst than trying to enjoy a tea while you are worried about them breaking your “good china”.
This tea was primarily set up by Sweet Pea and the Fashionista. I would highly recommend having your children as involved in the planning and implementation of parties/events as possible. I have definitely dropped the need to have things “picture perfect” so I can allow my children to help more.

I use this book that tells the story of the Last Supper through the Resurrection. We read only the pages through Holy Thursday during the tea. I also photocopied Chapters 14 and 15 of the Gospel of Mark so I could quote scripture about each food item.

For instance, when we read about the people waving the Palm Branches and hailing Jesus the “King”, with the screams of “Hosanna”, we wave our Romaine Lettuce “palms”. I made sure that the leaves were wet, and it was fun to “bless each other” as we yelled “Hosanna”. In years past, we have also used Spinach leaves.

Our Rotisserre chicken pieces reminded us of the cock that crowed when Peter denied Jesus. In the past, we have also made chicken salad, and chicken wings.

Our cheese “circles” and crackers remind us of the thirty pieces of silver that Judas betrayed Jesus for. (obviously, the kids helped themselves before this photo) My sister in law, was using Peppermint patties for these thirty pieces of silver. You could also use gold coins…however, I was interested in having less treats and more food to fill their bellies.

FYI…..I just used pre-cut cheese slices and found a handy “cap” for our iced tea container to make the circular shapes.

Pictured below:

our Fig Newtons to remind us of the story of the fig tree in the Garden of Gethsemane
our flatbread for the unleavened bread that Jesus broke and shared. Pita bread would be great here too.
our hershey kisses to remind us how Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss
the tic tacs to symbolize the bitter tears that Peter wept realizing that he denied the Lord, as Jesus had foretold
some Cool Whip to remind us of the “clouds of heaven” that Jesus told Caiaphas that he would be returning on.
“sleepytime” vanilla tea to remind us of how the apostles fell asleep while Jesus was praying in the garden.

Not pictured was our olive oil “dip” for the Mount of Olives.

This was a great afternoon tea for us this year. I would recommend having the kids wrap their chicken pieces in their romaine lettuce…add a little olive oil dip and you’ve got a great wrap.

Lacy, over at Catholic Icing, also has an awesome Passion Lunch depicted below. You can read more about that here.

Our second event is typically attending the Holy Thursday service at our Church and then my husband washes the children’s feet. This year, the husband was released from the hospital, on Monday, having been treated for pneumonia for 5 days. He has been trying to take it easy so we omitted these events this past year. However, I still wanted to mention them as they are important to our typical celebration.