One of my goals last month was to create a liturgical calendar for the first part of the year which included not only the usual seasons of Lent and Easter that we always celebrate, but also which Saints’ Days we would celebrate because they have special meaning to us. One of the first of those we got a chance to celebrate was my saint I chose at confirmation- St. Brigid.

Those of you who follow me on instagram have already had a sneak peek at some of the information in this post, so feel free to skip ahead a bit! But for those of you who don’t follow or may not have seen my post on Thursday, here’s a little bit of background about St. Brigid and why I chose her:

St. Brigid of Kildare is the OTHER patron saint of Ireland that doesn’t get talked about as much as ST. Patrick… although they say she was actually close friends with him. She is also the patron of newborns, beer, brewers, poets, dairymaids and midwives. As mentioned above, she is my confirmation saint and- full disclosure- I chose her because 1. That was the name of my church at the time and I thought her cross looked pretty and 2. I read that one of her miracles was turning a bathtub of water into beer so she sounded like my kind of woman. There’s a lot of folk lore surrounding her and she’s definitely worth looking up for more information. But what the rest of this post focuses on is how we celebrated her:

*Beer- I mean if you have a st. of beer and brewers that’s an easy go to. We bought some beer to drink sadly not stout because we needed a lighter beer to put in our beer cheese dip that would be really wonderful with some homemade pretzels around Octoberfest… but we just went with chips and bread… we also used the homemade bread to hold delicious, rich butter since another one of Brigid’s miracles related to her giving away butter to the poor and then having the stores of butter she’d given away be instantly replenished. The kids and I ate some slices hot out of the oven as the butter melted. It reminded me of that moment in Little Women when Amy says, “isn’t butter divinity?!” Needless to say we ended the day very full… good thing Lent’s coming up and we’ll be fasting a bit.
*Crafts: We used pipe cleaners to make St. Brigid’s cross… and by we I mean me because this was a little bit of an ambitious project for my three year old, but he still loved the end result! He also enjoyed the St. Brigid coloring page I printed out. If you ever want to celebrate this day too, you can get the coloring page HERE or you can google for other options- several are out there and many of them are free!
*Irish music and allllll the green. because, again, St. Patrick seems to get all the Irish glory and because both of those things make me happy!

I’m not sure if this REALLY counted as entertaining since it was just us, but I think it laid the seeds for future celebrations with more people. I had a lot of fun deciding to celebrate this, and I’m hoping after flu season ends we can open up some of these celebrations to more people outside our family! I also think this might become a new tradition for more than just this year… maybe in our family St. Brigid will be the new St. Patrick’s and we’ll go full out Guinness floats and all the festive fixings.