Organizing the Liturgical Year.

One thing I never have done, is organize all the wonderful things you can do throughout the liturgical year. The main problem is that by the time I realize a feast day is coming up, I don't have enough time to look for celebratory ideas, gather craft supplies, and have everything ready for the kids to do. After realizing that celebrating the liturgical year is very important to me and my family, I've decided to do something that will hopefully simplify my life in this aspect as well as make it easy for me to do activities.

My first step in creating a system was to GOOGLE!! If you look up "organizing the liturgical year," I guarantee that you won't get a lot of good sites. But I did stumble upon some excellent ideas from other Catholic bloggers, like myself!

My first visit was to By Sun and Candlelight. She has a great file folder system set up for all her homeschool, household, and liturgical needs. I like that she uses a crate because of the openness of it...easy to put stuff in and take stuff out. I tend to ignore our filing cabinet and only keep things in there that I don't really use frequently (think copies of birth certificates and old tax returns).

Another great post to check out for organizational ideas is Catholic Mom's Journey. She was also inspired by the file folder system (above) and tweaked it so that it worked for her. I like that she divides her system into 12 folders, one for each month of the year. She further divides each monthly folder into 5 separate folders, one for each week of the month.

Finally I visited Wildflowers and Marbles where Jen not only has FABULOUS pictures of her school room, but she also briefly mentions her liturgical organization. She divides each month into two. Each monthly folder holds two separate folders: one for liturgical plans and the other for seasonal plans.

After trying to decide what was going to work for me, I decided that Jen has the most simple and user friendly system. So in order to get my own act together, I went out and got supplies to start organizing my own liturgical year. Here is what I did.

1. Purchase a file box for the files (I need something with a lid in order to keep little hands out!).
2. Label 12 hanging files, one for each month.
3. Label 2 folders for each month. One for seasonal plans and the other for liturgical plans.
4. Label 3 additional hanging files for the liturgical seasons of Advent/Christmas, Lent, and Easter.

To clarify what I would put in the folders:

• The seasonal folders would include things not associated with the liturgical calendar. Holidays such as 4th of July, MLK Day, Father's Day, etc.
  
• The folder holding liturgical plans might include holy cards for that month's feast days, instructions to crafts, prayers, coloring pages, book lists, etc.
• Liturgical season folders would also hold things that just mesh from one month to another, like Advent activities.

I hope this sheds some light on organizing your own faith filled year!! It took me about 20 minutes to put this simple system together once I had all my supplies ready. It was mostly using my label machine that took me longest.