Guest5 Comments This post may contain affiliate links. Using links to these sites means I may earn a percentage of the purchase at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon associate, I receive a percentage of qualifying purchases
Reading Time: 5minutes
Want to point your family to Jesus? You can start around the dinner table! Here’s how to incorporate seasonal eating into the Christian Year calendar.
Eating seasonal produce has become a common goal for many families seeking healthier food and a closer tie to their local farmers. Raising chickens, urban gardening, and getting in tune with what’s in season has been an exciting journey for my family of five, but it’s not the journey I’m going to tell you about today.
I want to share about eating seasonally, not just with what grows in your garden, but according to a different calendar: The Christian Year.
Table of Contents
The Sacred in the Mundane
Almost five years ago, after our first baby was born, we wanted to start developing family traditions that would bring our Christian faith into our home in ways that our kids could touch, taste, and smell. Children are sensory learners (and grown-ups are, too!) but more importantly, the spiritual life touches our souls and our bodies. Ever since the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we live on an earth literally touched by heaven where the spiritual and the material intersect.
This has huge significance for the Christian life, even in the minutiae of daily tasks, because the sacred touches the mundane. Because of this, preparing a meal, setting the table, and enjoying food with family and friends can be an act of beautiful worship. And for the past 2,000 years, Christians have been building traditions that use food to help us walk through each year with Jesus.
While nearly all Christians celebrate Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, some Christians observe the liturgical seasons (such as Advent and Lent) and other traditional Christian feast days that honor holy men and women and biblical events like the Annunciation (when the Angel Gabriel spoke to Mary) or Pentecost. And many families who didn’t grow up with the Christian Year (I didn’t!) are seeking out ways to adopt these traditions in their homes to be part of the bigger community of their brothers and sisters in Christ across the world and through time.
Our culture has a binge and diet attitude toward food, but the Christian calendar offers us rhythms of feasting and fasting that always point us to Jesus.
Advent (the weeks before Christmas), and Lent (the 40 days before Easter Sunday) are seasons of spiritual preparation and fasting. (For our family, that means lots of simple soups and vegetarian meals like beans and rice.) This isn’t because we’re trying to take all the fun out of meal times during those seasons, but because eating simply is a great way to remind ourselves of what should be happening inside–removing distractions, making sacrifices, and making ready our hearts for the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
And then, because we’ve fasted from fancy meals, when we pull out all the stops for the seasons of Christmastide (12 days) and Eastertide (50 days), we’ve prepared ourselves to fully enter into the celebration and get down and party! (And we’re not already sick of the holidays before they begin.)
By involving our mouths and stomachs in the practice of our faith, we can really participate in the story of God’s love for humanity in a wonderful way.
We are reminded by our dinner fare that we are waiting for the coming of the Christ Child during Advent, we celebrate the arrival of Our Savior during Christmas, we thank God that he sent his Son not just for one group of people but for the whole world during Epiphany (the feast celebrating the Wise Men’s adoration of Jesus), we confront our sinfulness and follow Jesus to the Cross at Lent, and we throw the party of all parties to celebrate the Resurrection when Christ Our Hope conquered sin and death.
Beginning to observe the liturgical year at your table can be overwhelming. Especially if, like us, you didn’t grow up in a tradition that observe the Christian Year. But taking baby steps to orient your dinner table to the sacred, is such a meaningful journey.
You can slowly add onto your traditions and keep your recipes and ideas in a liturgical year binder. After years of developing liturgically-minded meals for our family, we compiled all our gluten-free real food recipes and published them with reflections and practical tips on observing the Christian Year in our book Feast! Real Food, Reflections, and Simple Living for the Christian Year. It’s the book we wish we had when we started this journey.
If the Christian Year is a new concept your family wants to pursue, I recommend just committing to one or two liturgically-minded meals per month. Maybe it’s Lent and you want to add a couple of simple vegetarian meals to the menu. Maybe you want to have a special feast for the Annunciation and read to your children from the Scriptures about the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary.
However you begin, the goal is to point our families to Jesus. And it can start around your dinner table.
Do you follow the Christian Year? What effective ways have you found to bring your faith into your home?
Looking for more ways to point your children to Christ? Read this post on 10 Practical Ways to Introduce a Child to Jesus.
Haley Stewart is a bookish Catholic wife and homeschooling mama to three littles. She can be found at her blog, Carrots for Michaelmas, or chasing her backyard chickens, eating bacon, and drinking too much coffee on her little urban homestead.
Seasonal food is produce that is purchased and consumed around the time that it is harvested. For example, purchasing fresh fiddlehead ferns in season in New York means buying them in the spring shortly after farmers have harvested them.
The 40 Days of Prayer is inspired by Matthew 4:1-11, where Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights and cited Scripture to resist the temptations of Satan. The forty days serve as a time of fasting and prayer to draw closer to God and strengthen your prayer life.
The liturgical year, also called the church year, Christian year, ecclesiastical calendar, or kalendar, consists of the cycle of liturgical days and seasons that determines when feast days, including celebrations of saints, are to be observed, and which portions of scripture are to be read.
The Christian year is anchored in the main salvation history events described in the New Testament. Its anchors are celebrations of Jesus' birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit.
"`Every creature that moves about on the ground is detestable; it is not to be eaten. You are not to eat any creature that moves about on the ground, whether it moves on its belly or walks on all fours or on many feet; it is detestable. Do not defile yourselves by any of these creatures.
Nutritional Deficits: Relying solely on seasonal foods could potentially lead to nutritional deficits, especially in regions where certain nutrients are hard to come by naturally at different times of the year.
The significance of these 40 days and 40 nights speak to us about our own times of temptation when we are weak and vulnerable. Through the words of satan, the tempter, and Jesus, the Son of God, we learn how to stand up to temptations.
In Western Christianity, fasting is observed during the forty-day season of Lent by many communicants of the Catholic Church, Lutheran Churches, Anglican Communion, Moravian Church, Methodist Churches, Western Orthodox Churches, United Protestant Churches and certain Reformed Churches, to commemorate the fast observed ...
In Lent, many Christians commit to fasting, as well as giving up certain luxuries in imitation of Christ's sacrifice during his journey into the desert for 40 days; this is known as one's Lenten sacrifice.
By its own reading of history, Roman Catholicism originated with the very beginnings of Christianity. An essential component of the definition of any one of the other branches of Christendom, moreover, is its relation to Roman Catholicism: How did Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism come into schism?
The earliest Christians were an apocalyptic sect within Second Temple Judaism. Christianity "emerged as a sect of Judaism in Roman Palestine" in the Hellenistic world of the first century AD, which was dominated by Roman law and Greek culture.
Year B began on the 1st Sunday of Advent in 2023 and now continues in 2024. Year C will commence on the 1st Sunday of Advent towards the end of 2024. Sundays and Solemnities are in CAPITALS.
The Julian calendar is the one that was introduced in the year 46 BC by Julius Caesar to all of the Roman Empire, and it is the calendar that was used during the life of Jesus Christ and at the time of the early Church.
Using these methods, most scholars assume a date of birth between 6 and 4 BC, and that Jesus' preaching began around AD 27–29 and lasted one to three years. They calculate the death of Jesus as having taken place between AD 30 and 36.
The first season of the liturgical year is Advent. During Advent we prepare to celebrate Jesus' birth and await Christmas, the celebration of the coming of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The color violet in Advent helps us to remember that we are preparing for the coming of Christ.
Christianity developed in Judea in the mid-first century CE, based first on the teachings of Jesus and later on the writings and missionary work of Paul of Tarsus. Originally, Christianity was a small, unorganized sect that promised personal salvation after death.
With an audience of over 1.5 million around the world, the Bible in a Year podcast is the No. 1 podcast in Religion and Spirituality on Apple Podcasts. And now, Catholics and non-Catholics alike can embark on a new journey as the Catechism in a Year podcast is set to launch on Jan.
Did Jesus eat meat? Many Christians readily assert that Jesus ate meat. Yet there isn't one instance in which he ate meat recorded in the Bible or other historical texts. Historians have frequently noted that Jesus' brother James was a vegetarian and had been raised vegetarian.
And yet, after lengthy research into the historical record, I have become convinced that Jesus Christ himself was in all likelihood a vegetarian, and that vegetarianism was probably a central tenet of the early Christian community founded by his disciples.
The only dietary restrictions specified for Christians in the New Testament are to "abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meat of strangled animals" (Acts 15:29), teachings that the early Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, preached for believers to follow.
What is a seasonal menu? A seasonal menu is a limited edition menu that utilizes seasonal ingredients to create dishes that appeal to the flavor profile of the time of year. Restaurants craft seasonal menus to promote ingredients that are fresh at the moment.
Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series in which the data experiences regular and predictable changes that recur every calendar year. Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs or repeats over a one-year period is said to be seasonal.
Seasonal eating is a sustainable way of eating, so you only eat fruits and vegetables that are in season for your geographic area. For example, eating winter squash in the fall, greens in the winter, broccoli in the spring, tomatoes in the summer, and so on.
Typically, produce sold in season is more cost-effective because it is the freshest and is not being grown against the elements. Conditions such as climate, soil quality, and sunlight all determine the rate plants will grow and their yield.
Introduction: My name is Margart Wisoky, I am a gorgeous, shiny, successful, beautiful, adventurous, excited, pleasant person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
We notice you're using an ad blocker
Without advertising income, we can't keep making this site awesome for you.
