Weekly Update: 2.8.26

It was an unusually quiet week. The snow on the ground last weekend turned into mud as the days went by, and we avoided the whole mess by staying indoors most of the time. We stayed busy doing odd jobs around the house — cleaning, working on taxes, filling nail holes, and more. The mundane was peppered with festivity, as we commemorated several Catholic feast days.

The week began with St. Brigid’s feast on Sunday, which we celebrated with scones and some homemade blackberry jam. We made the jam last week from wild berries we picked in the summer. The scones and jam both turned out beautifully.

Monday was Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (commemorating Mary and Joseph presenting Christ in the temple). In France, Candlemas is known as crepe day, so we had savory crepes filled with chicken and broccoli for dinner. We served them with a simple bistro salad and wine-poached pears.

On Thursday, we took a longer break from routine to celebrate Saint Agatha of Sicily’s feast day. We read a little about the saint, and we made a festive Sicilian meal — pasta, fruit salad, and cassatella di Sant’Agata — a short pastry filled with sweetened ricotta cheese, chocolate, and fruit. The pastry was delicious — we are already planning to make it a tradition.

The weather was finally nice enough this weekend to spend some time outdoors. On Friday, our dad, Grace, and I worked on exterior siding. It felt so good to be working in the sunshine. We installed the siding around our porch light electric box first, and our dad wired the light. After going without one for so long, having an outdoor light on our deck feels like such a treat.

On Saturday, we went shopping in Bolivar, stocking up on groceries for the next couple weeks — no small task since we have a lot more festivity to look forward to. We spent the afternoon whipping up Superbowl snacks — though we aren’t sure if we will tune into the game this year since our beloved Chiefs aren’t playing (sniff). Either way, we plan to watch The All-American Halftime Show, an alternative from Turning Point USA. While the rest of the Gage ladies made snacks, Grace made a basbousa (a middle eastern cake), in honor of Saint Josaphine Bakhita, who we remember today.

When I wasn’t cooking yesterday, I helped our brother Jeremiah smoke some baby back ribs on the Kamado Joe grill he gave the family for Christmas. We tried the 3-2-1 rib method, which was somewhat complex. We started by coating the ribs with mustard and a rub, then smoked them for three hours. Then we wrapped the ribs in foil with some of our home-brewed Irish ale and continued smoking them for two hours. Finally, we moved the ribs into a foil boat with honey barbecue sauce for the final hour. They smelled so good all day. And when we finally tasted them, they were melt-in-your-mouth delicious. We will definitely be smoking ribs again in the future, though next time our brother wants to invest in a rib rack and rack extender for our grill.

The festive Sunday plans shifted the feel of the whole weekend. It made me think of a comment my niece Eilley-Mae made while watching us make the Saint Agatha pastries. She said one of her favorite things about becoming Catholic is all of the feast days. When we were Protestant, she said, we had to wait all year for Christmas, and then we had to wait for Easter. Historically, I already thought of our family as pretty festive, making a big deal out of even secular holidays — though paying attention to minor feast days in the Catholic calendar has definitely led to an increase of such fun. Still, Eilley’s comment made me think about the importance of holidays — holy days — and how they shift our focus from the mundane to the celebratory. Life is hard. We all deal with more suffering than we like to talk about — be they small sorrows or soul-crushing griefs. So often, the canonized Christian Saints are those who have dealt with the worst of what life has to offer — and they gave glory to God anyway. They flourished in all the ways that really matter, inspiring us that we can do the same, no matter what.

One reason I’ve always been drawn to homesteading is that it allows us to choose the rhythms we shape our lives around. For us, homesteading isn’t just about creating a nourishing life physically — it’s also about creating a nourishing life spiritually. We want to live rightly ordered lives, both with creation and with our Creator. Just as we have been blessed by living more closely aligned with the natural world these last years, we have been blessed by leaning more deeply into the Church calendar these last months. This sort of Christian living was born out of the wisdom of centuries — what a gift to rediscover it.