All Saints Day, the day on which Catholics celebrate all the saints, known and unknown, is an old feast. It arose out of the Christian tradition of celebrating the martyrdom of saints on the anniversary of their martyrdom. When martyrdoms increased during the persecutions of the late Roman Empire, local dioceses instituted a common feast day in order to ensure that all martyrs, known and unknown, were properly honored.

Originally I thought we would frame our craft and food around Saints that had the same birthday as the kids. You can find what Saints were born on your birthday here. However the Saints on the boys birthdays didn't really have stories that were easy to think of crafts for. So I found a few popular saints that lent themselves to a cute craft and yummy sounding food.

For our craft we made flowers and were inspired by St. Therese of Lisieux who is often referred to as "Little Flower" According the Society of the Little Flower, St. Therese was known as the Little flower because "St. Therese loved nature, and often used the imagery of nature to explain how the Divine Presence is everywhere, and how everything is connected in God's loving care and arms. Therese saw herself as "the Little Flower of Jesus" because she was just like the simple wild flowers in forests and fields, unnoticed by the greater population, yet growing and giving glory to God. " For more information on St. Therese of Lisieux click here. In addition to a flower being a fun and different craft then what we have previously done, St. Therese was a good pick because her celebration day is October 1st so we aren't too far off in celebrating both her day and All Saints Day.

I got out a bunch of stuff from the reuse drawer and craft drawer to create flowers with.

Cutting the egg carton to create the petals.

For our food we made pumpkin whoopie pies. St. Isadore was our inspiration saint for this food. St. Isadore is the Patron Saint of Farmers. Farming and the pumpkin patch were fresh in our minds so that was an easy in to talk to the kids about how the food tied in with the holiday, plus Halloween just here and Thanksgiving coming up we have lots of pumpkin puree hanging around the house and this seemed like a yummy way to use some of that up. If you want more information on St. Isadore a good site is here.

The recipe we used can be found here. As usual I subbed some almond flour for about a third of the flour in the recipe. I also used half butter and half oil for the recipe because I personally like the taste of butter- but like how moist the oil makes it so- half and half seemed like a nice compromise. The kids really liked the cookies and I preferred them without the cream- I'm thinking about playing around with the recipe by adding some oats and maybe chocolate chips in the future.

Craft Theology