Palm Sunday celebration

Yesterday we celebrated Palm Sunday. We are not really religious here, so I was wondering how to incorporate Easter into our year cycle. Fortunately, the All Year Round book explained the meaning of this festival from Waldorf point of view and now I have no hesitations. I love how Waldorf system looks at religion - it leaves the question of faith to you and relates religion to Nature, something people experienced and tried to explain to themselves for millennia. Easter is just the celebration of birth, of renewal, of spring. And Resurrection of Christ is a symbol of that, so you can decide for yourself whether to talk to kids about it at all. I just explained to Kitten (even though she is so young that no explanation is really necessary) that we are doing what we are doing because the morning is almost here.

The cockerel is a symbol of morning everywhere, so naturally he heralds the coming of Christ and the beginning of the new covenant.

On our Nature table this week will be the Lenten garden with a small grotto, stone path, lake on the hill, tree branch in a dish of earth and 6 small candles. We will light and burn one candle before bedtime until Friday. Saturday is a day of silence.

We also made bread cockerels. The recipe I used was from All Year Round but I guess you could use any yeast dough. If somebody is interested, I can write the recipe here. This is how they looked before baking. I used raisins for eyes and cloves for feet.

And here they are right out of the oven. They were delicious, Kitten was very excited about her bread being shaped like this.