Don’t be scared of Halloween

Angelo Stagnaro explains the Christian origins of Halloween in his U.S. Catholic article, Don’t be scared of Halloween. “We couldn’t have arranged a more perfect synthesis of devotion and festivity had we tried,” he writes. ”When you get to the core of what the holiday is, you find an overwhelmingly Catholic Christian holiday. It should be recognized and celebrated as such-warts, spider webs, and all.”

Readers’ comments follow the article.  I do have to agree with the reader who wrote that what she’d most like to change about Halloween is: “That parents wouldn’t turn their kids into pimps and whores to treat-or-treat.” I’ve seen one too many pimp costumes coming to my door, along with pre-adolescent “French maids” in fishnet stockings and little aprons.

What do family dinners have to do with faith?

GA Catholic sends this comment:  ’Without questioning the value of sharing meals together as a family, what in the world does this have to do with ‘Handing on the faith?’”

This comment refers to the post mentioning Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children, celebrated on September 28, brought to you by the folks at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). 

 Great question, GA Catholic.  

1. One of the ways we Catholics talk about Mass is as a meal.  If our kids rarely experience meals eaten with others in a family setting, without the TV on, how will they ever be able to recognize the connections between family meals and the Mass?

2. One of the best vehicles to hand on the faith is the family dinner table discussion.  I often ask my kids, “Tell me some stories about your day.” (This proved much more successful than saying, “How was school”?) Answers to this question tell us a lot about their friends, their teachers, their ethical dilemmas, their attitudes toward people and things.  We can weigh in with a faith perspective on these topics.  On Sundays you can ask kids what they thought about a particularly challenging story you heard at Mass that day: the prodigal son, the laborers in the vineyard, Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the Ark. Kids have opinions, questions about many of these stories if you give them the chance to express them.

3. Never eating dinner together is a sign that something in the family is out of whack.  Priorities are skewed.  Kids’ sports commitments may be running the family schedule, for example.  (Few families would say, “Our kids sports are the most important thing in our family life,” but our schedules might say something different.)  “A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children”  is an invitation to look at our family priorities and whether our schedules match our priorities. How do you schedule in “handing on the faith” if you never eat dinner together?  Here’s a great interview on family priorities from U.S. Catholic magazine.  

4. Joseph Califano and his researchers at CASA say that eating dinner with your kids regularly is one way to keep them off drugs.  I assume anyone wanting to hand on the faith to their kids would of course want to keep them off drugs, especially when the method involves something as easy, cheap, and noncontroversial as macaroni and cheese.  

5. Family meals are a great opportunity to pray together.  Let the kids take turns praying spontaneously for the needs of the world, their friends, your family members.  It’s good to give kids opportunities to pray with and in front of others.

I could go on and on…

November Moms’ Night Out

Download the November 2009 Moms’ Night discussion starters here.

A new concept: Dinner with your family

Stock up on mac & cheese or whatever is your kids’ favorite dinner in preparation for Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children, which will be celebrated across the country this Monday, September 28.

Family Day is brought to you by the folks at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA).   CASA Chairman Joseph A. Califano, Jr. says, “If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in our nation’s substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week.”

And while you’re at it, check out CASA’s research on raising drug-free kids.

Phillies fan dad rates a homily

Check out this great homily for Sunday, Sept 19 by Fr. Austin Fleming, which took off from the popular You Tube video of Steve Monforto, the dad at the Phillies game who caught his first foul ball, handed it to his 3-year-old daughter, and then watched as she turned and tossed the baseball over the railing.  The look on his face  and his reaction to his young daughter as he realizes what’s happening is a homily unto itself.   Fr. Fleming blogs regularly as A Concord Pastor.

Looking for a few good books?

Most of us parents are perpetually hunting for good new (or old) books to read to our kids.  Now comes Mary Margaret Keaton in Book marked: Stories to raise your children by in the October U.S. Catholic, who points out all the ways that reading can deepen a child’s faith.  She lists a number of books in the article itself, and you can write in with your own favorite kids’ books here. 

Also read what bestselling author Jim Trelease says about the value of reading aloud to your kids, long after they can read to themselves.  Check out Trelease’s Treasury of Read-Alouds (for all ages).

Happy reading!

October Moms’ Night Out

Download the October 2009 Moms’ Night out discussion starters

How to screen your kids’ movies

My sister-in-law, a teacher, told me recently about the day she discovered to her horror that many of the 6-year-olds in her first-grade class had seen the movie “Saw.” 

Assuming for the sake of argument that none of us gathered here would do anything like that intentionally to our kids, here are three sites to ensure that you’re not inadvertently dragging your little ones to movies filled with gore,  sex, or violence. 

Nell Minow, the Movie Mom, rates movies at Beliefnet and recommends an age range for whom the movie is appropriate.   Down to earth, common-sense reviews.

Screenit.com offers an exhaustive, detailed analysis of old and new movies (how many swear words, descriptions of each violent or sexual scene, etc). You can subscribe to get this data for brand-new movies; movies older than one week are available free at the site. If you don’t want to subscribe, click “no thanks” at the bottom of the home page to get to the movie database.

Sister Rose Pacatte, FSP director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Culver City, California, has a wonderful blog on movies.  We’ve interviewed her here at our offices and I can say I’ve never met a funnier, livelier source on media literacy and finding themes of our faith in movies and on TV.  She even has a whole list of movies with themes mirroring the seven sacraments and conducts a National Film Retreat each year.

September 2009 Moms’ Night Out discussion starters

Find the September 2009 Moms’ Night Out discussion starters for the September issue of At Home with Our Faith.

May 2009 Moms’ Night questions

Download the May 2009 Mom’s Night Out discussion starters here.