Anchor:  a person or thing that can be relied on for support, stability, or security; mainstay: Hope was his only anchor.

When we work to become the author of own family life, we take on the authority to provide our spouse and children and ourselves stability.  An effective way to do this is through the use of rhythm.  If you have small children, it takes time to build a family rhythm that encompasses the year.  If you are homeschooling older children and also have younger children not ready for formal learning, the cycle of the year through the seasons and through your religious year becomes the number one tool you have for family unity, for family identity, for stability.

Ah, month of October, I love you so!  I love fall and October is so lovely here in the Deep South.  Apples and pumpkins are in full swing, the leaves are finally starting to turn yellow and red, the temperatures are still warm during the day (around 70 degrees Farenheit) but the nights are cool enough for an extra blanket on the bed.

These are the festivals that are my anchors this month:

October 4th- Blessing of the Animals and the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi

October 18 – St. Luke the Evangelist  (I feel especially close to St. Luke).

October 31 – Halloween is my least-favorite holiday of the entire year (Ba! Humbug! LOL), but I love All Saints Day and All Souls Day and those are very important feast days in the liturgical year, so I am looking forward to those days and preparing for those days at the end of this month.  I don’t really decorate for Halloween, but the children do go trick or treating.

Ideas for Celebration:

Much of our celebrating is tied up with our parish this year from the Blessing of the Animals for the Feast Day of St. Francis to our children singing in two Divine Liturgies on All Saints Day to remembering our loved ones on All Souls Day.  A month of doing in community!

For ideas about a fall October circle and stories for the little ones, please see the post in last October’s Monthly Anchor Points  here.

If you need a post about celebrating Halloween in the Waldorf home, try this back post.

If you need a post about All Saints Day and All Souls Day celebrations, look here.

Pumpkin bread and pumpkin muffins

Homemade applesauce

Homemade bone broths with nutritive herbs

Taking care of the birds

Fall hiking

Gathering photographs of loved ones in preparation for All Saints Day/All Souls Day

Buying bulbs to plant in the ground for spring

The Domestic Life:

This is the time where I really start making more bone broths and infuse it with herbs – dandelion root, burdock, astragalus.  A suggestion was made today to add echinacea to it as well, so I am going to try that!

Changing bed linens to flannel sheets and adding blankets and thicker comforters

Stocking up on birdseed

Making sure we all have hats, gloves, snow gear  and boots for winter

Gathering the books for this month’s Saints

Thinking ahead to Thanksgiving and Advent

What are you working on this month as your anchor points?

Many blessings,
Carrie

I love the month of September, a month of new beginnings for so many of us – for my Orthodox Christian friends, it is the beginning of the liturgical year; for many of us in America it marks Labor Day and the unofficial end of summer and beginning of fall, and for many it is the beginning of a new school year.

Fall is my favorite season, and I love the smells of fall, smoke from a good bonfire, crunching leaves, the snapping of twigs when we walk through the woods or on the farm, the delicious foods associated with fall harvest.  There is a beautiful poem in the book “All Year Round” on page 129 that could make a particularly lovely blessing for this time of year:

Thanks to our mother, the earth, which sustains us;

Thanks to the rivers and streams and their water;

Thanks to the corn and the grain fields that feed us;

Thanks to the herbs which protect us from illness;

Thanks to the bushes and trees and their fruiting;

Thanks to the moon and the stars in the darkness;

Thanks to the sun and his eye that looks earthward;

Thank the Great Spirit for all of his goodness.

Adapted from an Iroquois Indian address of thanksgiving

I am thinking a lot about harvest, apples, and acorns.  Apples are big in my state toward the midpoint of this month, and I have many “apple” things planned for our kindergarten aged child – apple prints, cooking with apples, baking apple bread, making dried apples, apple picking.  I also have ideas about leaves.  In the book “Mrs. Sharp’s Traditions”, an idea is suggested for a “Maple Leaf and Nutting Party”, which we can do here more in October or toward the end of this month.  Tree and leaf rubbings, leaf prints, collecting leaves and dipping them in glycerin are all fun seasonal things to do this month.

This is also the month that ends in the Feast Day of St. Michael and All Angels, known in the Waldorf tradition as Michaelmas Continue reading →

Anchor:  a person or thing that can be relied on for support, stability, or security; mainstay: Hope was his only anchor.

When we work to become the author of own family life, we take on the authority to provide our spouse and children and ourselves stability.  An effective way to do this is through the use of rhythm.  If you have small children, it takes time to build a family rhythm that encompasses the year.  If you are homeschooling older children and also have younger children not yet ready for formal learning, the cycle of the year through the seasons and through your religious year becomes the number one tool you have for family unity, for family identity, for stability.

I wrote about my homeschool planning method of marking seasonal and liturgical ideas down for each month in past posts, which has led to the creation of this series.  Now we are extending our mood of celebration into August!  I wrote about  August last year  as well. It is interesting to see how the same month can feel the same in so many ways, and yet so different.

This is the month that I associate with heat, rain showers, lakes, blackberries, anticipation, and the quality of  humility.  It is a month where fall peaks around the corner in some ways and we know school and more regular rhythm is indeed on its way! Continue reading →