Celebrating Sabbath in CTG

Part of our curriculum is to celebrate several Old Testament Feasts. The first one we did was the Sabbath celebration.

In the morning, I read a little bit to the children from the Celebrating Biblical Feast books about the Sabbath. I explained that it would not be a regular school day, that we would have a celebration instead. (Of course, at this point, Tigger asked if they would be getting presents.) Then Rabbit and I got busy. I started with making challah - special bread for the celebration. I didn't follow the recipe in the book. Since I grind my own whole wheat grain, I just followed my recipe and braided the loaves instead of baking them in a pan. Here's what it looked like:

Then we cleaned the house. Dad came home early, and read through the pertinent pages so he would be well prepared for the meal.

Rabbit had made the challah covering earlier in the week. We followed mfwrocks' idea of just photocopying the picture from the book a placing it over the bread:

(I don't think the picture does it justice.)

We had gone camping a few weeks ago, and one of our fellow campers gave us 3 fish from their fising expeditions - 2 trout and a salmon, we think. So, we grilled the fish (I don't bake fish in the house, because I don't want the house smelling like fish), made mashed potatoes, and had a salad. We used grape juice instead of real wine. My kids aren't into soup, so I didn't follow the recipe or meal suggestions from the book. Besides, I figured it was the symbolism of the bread, wine, and candles that were important, not the exact food. Here is the table all set for the meal (except for the fish):

We didn't wait until sundown to have our meal - it would have been 9:00pm, and that is way past the kids' bedtime! We went through the steps as outlined in the teacher's manual and book. I lit the candles. Dad did all his steps. The children really loved having their Daddy lay his hands on them and pray a blessing over them. You should have seen the smiles.

We did not finish the Sabbath celebration on Saturday. We ended up going to a local amusement park for the day, and by the time we got home, exhaustion was settling in. I figure we can choose another Saturday evening to finish.

Anyway, it was a neat experience, and I'm looking forward to doing some more feasts.