Clans on Broadway - Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday, similar to Mother's Day, also called Mid-Lent Sunday, is observed on the fourth Sunday in Lent. The earliest predecessor to mothering Sunday can be traced back to Ancient Greece, when three days were set aside to honour the mother of all the gods and goddesses. Some say the ceremonies in honor of Cybele were adopted by the early church to venerate the Mother of Christ, Mary. Others believe the Mother Church was substituted for mother goddess and custom began to dictate that a person visit the church of his/her baptism on this day. People attended the mother church of their perish, laden with offerings.

In England in the 1600's, young men and women who were apprentices or servants returned home on Mothering Sunday, would bring small gifts like trinkets or a "mothering cake" to their mothers. This helped to add a festive touch to the day. Sometimes frumenty was served, which is wheat grains boiled in sweet milk, sugared and spiced.

In northern England and in Scotland, the preferred food was carlings - pancakes made of steeped Pease fried in butter, with pepper and salt.

Another kind of mothering cake was the simnel cake, a very rich fruit cake. It is boiled in water, then baked, and often finished with a marzipan. Simnel cake has now evolved to a lighter fruit cake, that has two layers of fruit cake separated by the marzipan or almond paste. The top of the cake has eleven marzipan balls, that are to represent the true disciples of Christ, Judas is emitted from this.

‘I’ll to thee a Simnell bring
‘Gainst thou go’st a mothering,
So that, when she blesseth thee,
Half that blessing thou’lt give to me.’
Robert Herrick 1648

This Sunday is known by many names, ranging from Simnel Sunday, Rose Sunday, and Refreshment Sunday.

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Rauncie Kinnaird

Clans Celts & Clover

Email: r.k@sasktel.net Phone: 306-382-4443 Website: http://www.clansceltsandclover.com

The Fine Art of Halloween Decorations - How To Be Scary and Beautiful at the Same Time

If you have children, Halloween is a great excuse to have some family fun together. It's an opportunity to dress up the whole family in weird and frightening costumes; and to decorate your normally peaceful home in the out-of-this-world Halloween theme, turning it into a scary haunted house to the delight of your children.

Every year can be such family fun opening up the boxes of your stock of Halloween decorations. Children love getting out the hairy giant spiders and spider webs, spooky ghosts, witches on broomsticks, ghoulish outfits and costumes, vampire teeth, witches hats and noses and everything else that goes into making up Halloween. You would think it would frighten them, but children take great delight helping put up the the haunting and eerie decorations that go with Halloween.

Everyone goes about their Halloween celebration in a different way. Some are too busy or not interested. Many people just make their Halloween decoration simple, such as simply carving out a pumpkin face, putting a candle inside and placing it in a window facing the street.

Others like to put in an all-out effort in their front yard, with subdued and changing lighting, lightning flashes, cemetery tombstones, zombies, ghosts, vampires, bats, spider webs and even fog machines and sound effects. It's quite a wacky idea when you think about it, but all good fun. Yet other people concentrate on a Halloween decoration for their front door entry way, to offer a spooky welcome to trick or treaters.

It can be well worth loading up the family and friends in your car at dusk and driving around your neighborhood in the days leading up to Halloween, just to see and enjoy the amazing effort some people will put in to participate and share in the celebration. You can bet your children will be planning out their trick or treating when they know who is in the Halloween spirit and likely to welcome them with good fun, and a good stock of candies and sweet treats.

Occasionally you will find people who also decorate the inside of their homes, and perhaps have tours through their seasonally haunted house to show it off and to raise funds for a charity. Your family will take delight in the visit experience if you are fortunate to have one of these enthusiasts in your neighborhood.

Others like to decorate just a room or two in their homes as the theme for a Halloween costume dinner or party, and invite guests around for some Halloween fun.

Whatever your budget, there is a growing choice of Halloween decorations to choose from today. With better manufacturing methods and more imaginative designs, the quality of Halloween decorations on offer seems to get better every year. Even if you prefer to make your own decorations, or have accumulated a stock of decorations over the years, there will always be a few new additions to catch your eye in the shops leading up to Halloween.

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Warning - Read This Before You Purchase Halloween Contact Lens - Otherwise Your Celebration May Be Limited

If you are looking for a very striking effect to go with your Halloween costume this year, something that will make you stand out in the crowd, consider wearing Halloween theme contact lenses. Your appearance will have an amazing effect. Some people will not be able to take their eyes off your fascinating new look. One glance from you will have some people recoil in fright at your unexpected eyes. Whatever their reactions, you will be the center of everyone's attention.

For years, actors have been able to radically change their appearance with contact lenses. Now you can too, and you can have a lot of fun with the idea.

What will you look like wearing Halloween contact lenses?

The idea is to change not just the color of the iris of your eyes, but also the shape of your pupil. The center is kept clear so you can still see, but the rest of the contact lens has become like an artist's canvas, open to any imaginative design desired. This year you will have an astonishing range of contact lenses to choose from.

You can look like an animal, for example. A cat, wolf or a reptile look in your contact lens are three very popular halloween choices, with variations available for you to choose in the colors and shapes of the pupil that people will see. Cat eyes in green, yellow, or even red, are among the most in demand.

You can select alien looks, including contact lenses with movie character themes such as Dune and Vader, or become an out-of-this-world banshee, predator or slither.

Unexpected or unnatural color choices are favorites. For Halloween a red eye fits the theme closely. Plain opaque black or icy white eyes can send a chill down the spine of those you meet. There is a vast range of fun colors available now to give you a unique and distinctive appearance.

Designers have had a ball coming up with imaginative shapes and patterns. Logos, sports team themes, flags and patriotic themes like stars and stripes, smiley faces, hypnotic spirals, spider webs, computer chips and all manner of fun ideas have found their way onto contact lenses. Imagine your pupil in the shape of a star or a square instead of round.

If you have your own crazy ideas and are prepared to pay the extra cost, it is even possible to have a custom design made for your contact lens. Just make sure you allow enough time to get the work done for you before your Halloween party.

Most designer contact lenses are plano, or usable by anyone whatever their eyesight. If you need corrective lenses to see clearly, these days you can also have most designer lenses made up to your own prescription.

Contact lenses also come in size variations. The most common are round and fit over the middle of your eye. If you are prepared to pay more and take more time over fitting the lenses, you can choose sclero contact lenses that cover most of your eye. Imagine what you would look like with all of your eye glowing red or green at your Halloween party?



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Hints for Halloween Party Decorations

Your Halloween party decorations will probably include the standard range of items, but there are some simple little extra tricks you can easily add that will add a scary surprise, and give your guests a chilling fright and cause a few screams.

You will no doubt be planning plenty of carved pumpkin jack-o-lanterns lit with candles placed around your party room, their ghoulish faces gleaming in the subdued lighting. Luminous images of ghosts and ghouls of all description can be bought and hung to glow in the low lighting around the walls of the room. Gossamer cloth or commercial imitation spider web quickly creates a haunted house atmosphere.

Suspending decoration items like bats, flying witches on broom sticks, large hairy spiders, balloons with ghostly faces, skeletons and the like from the ceiling, down to to face level, will have your guests dodging around among these horrors in the flickering candle light, and always on the lookout for their next fright. Distributing plastic spiders and other shocking surprises around where people sit, or on tables among the drinks and plates, will help to keep your guests on edge.

If you hang a number of thin threads from the ceiling in different parts of the room they will not be noticed in the subdued lighting, but will be felt unexpectedly as your guests move around. This can be a surprising sensation, and suggests a ghostly presence that will often get a shrieking reaction from your guests.

Frights come when unexpected things suddenly happen. You could set up a few lights on timers to occasionally briefly illuminate scary scenes or pictures in two or three otherwise dark corners of the room. The effect is increased if you are able to coordinate sound effects to draw attention when the light comes on. Depending on the age group of your guests, you could create a frightening three dimensional scene that is briefly revealed, such as a ghostly headless or hanging man.

Fog machines are readily available from party hire specialists. Used with lighting effects, they will immediately create a chilling and eerie atmosphere in the room as the fog floats across the floor of the room around the feet of your guests. If you can, set up an artificial tombstone or two to conceal the exact location of the machine.

With large screen televisions becoming more common, you could play a horror movie in the background, with the sound turned down, to help to set the scene.

Music plays a large part in creating the atmosphere. At least for the early part of the party, Halloween sound effects and music like the classic Monster Mash will heighten the sense of tension in the room. With the party in full swing later on, your guests will expect to hear their favorite dance music tracks. A compilation interspersing Halloween sound effects would help to maintain the atmosphere.

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How to Wear Halloween Costume Contact Lens

Have you thought of making costume contact lenses part of your Halloween costume this year? Theatrical costume designers have called on the use of contact lenses to transform the appearance of actors on stage and in movies for many years. The eyes are where most of us look first when we meet someone, and simply changing the appearance of the eyes can make an actor seem more handsome, beautiful, dangerous, magical, inhuman, or whatever the designer wishes.

Until recently most of us have not been able to afford or obtain designer contact lenses with these amazing transformational powers. Now we can.

How would you like to look at your Halloween party this year? You could become almost anyone or anything you want by just inserting tiny and perfectly safe contact lenses in your eyes.

There are two main types of designer contact lenses. The lowest cost, most common and easiest to use are small round discs that sit over the center of your eyes. You can still see through a clear center in almost all cases - one exception is an opaque lens you could wear over one eye to look blind in that eye. All the area around that clear center is available to designers to create all manner of colors and effects.

The second main type of contact lens is the sclero lens, that fits over the whole eye. With these lenses you can change the color and appearance of even the whites of your eyes. Eyes that are red or green all over, for example, can be a very scary and unnatural look, and perhaps exactly what you need for your Halloween party look this year. The striking impact of a designer sclero contact lens can blow you away with the design possibilities when you have such a large area to work with. However, these sclero lenses are more expensive and more difficult to fit, and much less widely used. Of course, this means if you do use them, you will stand out even more in the Halloween crowd.

Costume contact lenses are usually made plano, or ready and safe to be used by anybody whatever their eyesight. If you need prescription lenses, you can usually arrange for this to be done especially for you, but you should expect that there may be additional costs. If you are only wearing them for a few hours at a Halloween party it may not be worth the trouble unless your eyes need a lot of correction for you to see well enough.

Some contact lenses come as soft disposables, and some of these offer cosmetic color changes. However the kind of high visual impact costume contact lenses you will be looking for as part of a Halloween costume are more likely to be hard lenses, which give more scope for designers to add their variations. There are even expensive unique hand painted special effects designer lenses available. Hard contact lenses have a longer lifetime than disposables, at least a year if cared for properly as your optometrist will advise.

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Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree

        The moment you gaze upon a Christmas Tree, you will instantly think about Christmas or the Yuletide season, festooned with glittering lights and beautiful decorations. Beneath the Christmas Tree are pretty gift-wrapped parcels, destined to be opened on Christmas Day itself.

 

          Have you ever decorated a Christmas Tree and wondered how this tradition came about? Similarly, how creative can you be when it comes to making tree decorations?

 

          Let’s take a look at ancient roots and modern-day offshoots.

 

Ancient Roots

 

        The traditional decorating of the Christmas Tree has its roots in rituals of Autumn and Winter of old Northern Europe. For the Teutons, Celts and Gauls, trees like pine, fir and spruce symbolized eternal life. For the Teutons, they would hang pieces of cloth, fruit and other gifts on these evergreen trees during the Winter Solstice. The people would ask for renewal of life and fertility at the tree.

 

          As Christianity became dominant, such pagan practices became subsumed under Christianized traditions. The Christians basically integrated existing beliefs into more acceptable norms of thinking. There is a German myth about St Winifred made a miraculous young fir tree appear with shining lights on its branches and the image of the baby Jesus above.

  

Evergreen Joy

 

        The Christmas Tree is predominantly an evergreen. So, you get to see live Douglas firs, pines and spruces for sale in major supermarkets during the Christmas season. Some people would opt for the paper and plastic tree options. But having a live tree itself is a special occasion.

 

          In North America, families would go to tree orchards and farms to chop their choice Christmas Tree. They would decorate their trees with shop-bought or home-made decorations, draping fairy lights on the branches. It is a time for families to get together and decorate the tree.

 

          For live evergreens, always remember to give them water, because they would ultimately wilt away after the end of the season. If you are an advocate of eco-friendly practices, do think of ways how to recycle your Christmas Tree. You can make wreaths out of the branches or chop the wood down for firewood. It is sad to see many trees discarded after Christmas. So, recycling them would be a good idea.

 

Decorations From Home

 

          There are some families who would make popcorn chains to decorate their Christmas trees. More creative families would dry fruits and hang them on the branches, making their trees uniquely theirs.

 

          If you are keen to make your Christmas tree decorations, why not take a look around your backyard or garden. If you have seed-pod producing trees, you can collect the seed-pods (if they have fallen from the tree) and use them as decoration material. Make sure the seed-pods are not poisonous! Clean them with a slightly wet cloth. You can start coating them with gold or silver paint (whatever color you desire). After they have dried, you can tie strings on the seed-pods. There you go – your very own tree decorations.

 

          If your taste leans towards the more edible, you can hang crystal-glazed grapes or berries. Get fine sugar and the berries of your choice. Coat the berries with egg white and dust the sugar gently on them. Tie durable string on the berries and tasty decorations are ready to be hung. Remember to take them quickly, because they are perishable!

 

Have Fun

 

        So, remember to have fun with your Christmas tree. May your Yuletide season be filled with festive joy!

Christmas Decorating While On A Budget

Christmas shop

Are you one of the millions of people who loves to celebrate Christmas? When asked, the majority of individuals respond that Christmas is one of their favorite holidays, if not their favorite.  If you love to celebrate Christmas, there is a good chance that you may be interested in decorating your Christmas decor.  Unfortunately, as you likely already know, decorating your place can get quite expensive. However, if you want to decorate for Christmas, but you do not have an unlimited amount of money to do so, there are a number of ways that you can go about decorating for Christmas while on a budget. 

Perhaps, the best ways to save money on Christmas directions is to decide ahead of time what you need.  Unfortunately, a large number of shoppers, possibly just like you, have a difficult time with impulse buying. Impulse buying is when shoppers purchase an item as soon as they see it, an item that they may not have intended on purchasing.  If you are shopping for Christmas decorations and you are on a limited budget, you are advised to not give into your impulse buying urges. It is best to decide what you are going to buy ahead of time.  If you are unsure exactly what you would like to buy, that is fine, but you may want to focus on which rooms that you want to decorate for Christmas and which rooms you do not.  This will also make it easier for you eliminate unnecessary purchases. 

Once you have decided which type of Christmas decorations that you would like to buy, you can then start shopping; however, it is important to remember your goal of saving money.  Christmas decorations are nice, but you will not want to spend more money on decorations than you have.  The less money you spend on Christmas decorations, the more money you will have to put towards a nice Christmas dinner or Christmas gifts.  That is why it is important that you take where you are shopping, as well as when, into consideration. 

If you are shopping for Christmas decorations on a budget, one of your first stops should be your local dollar store. While many individuals assume that the items sold within dollar stores are poor in quality, they aren’t always. In fact, around Christmastime, you could get some really nice Christmas decorations for a dollar or less. Depending on the dollar store you choose to shop at, you should be able to walk away with Christmas pictures, Christmas wall hangings for kids, Christmas tree decorations, Christmas lights, and even Christmas potholders for your kitchen.Dollar store items for the most part is always a dollar or less. 

In addition to dollar stores, you may also want to check out your local discount stores. Discount tores, in most cases, are a cross between a convenient store and a department store. They tend to be somewhat small in size, but most dollar stores carry a wide variety of different products, including Christmas decorations.  While the prices at discount stores will vary, you should be able to find beautiful Christmas decorations for fewer than five dollars each.  Of course, there will always be items that cost more than five dollars, but you may be surprised with the selection of low-cost Christmas decorations that can be found at your local discount store.

Although there is a good chance that you may prefer to have brand new Christmas crafts, it might not always be possible.An online auction site would be a good place to search for Christmas decorations for low cost shopping. By carefully examining which items you choose to buy, you could walk away with Christmas decorations that are slightly used, but look new. 

As previously mentioned, it is also important that you keep when you are shopping in mind. For the largest selection of Christmas decorations, you will want to shop early, but for the best prices, you may want to wait until it gets closer to Christmas.  In the days leading up to Christmas, some retail stores offer discounts on their Christmas supplies, including decorations. In fact, right after Christmas many of these discounts reach up to seventy-five or ninety percent off.  Although shopping right after Christmas won’t help you this year, but it may be able to help you decorate your home, at an affordable price, next year.

Holiday Crafts: Thanksgiving Decorations Kids Can Make

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday! What a spiritual renewal to take a day to reflect over the past year about just how good God has been to you and your family, to give you harvest and shelter, health and hope. To get the most out of this joyous occasion, make some holiday crafts with your children. These days, Thanksgiving often gets squeezed out by Hallowe'en's spooky decorations and the lights and gala of Christmas. With the following holiday crafts, your home can be decorated for this quieter but important celebration.

Turkeys are a natural choice for decorations. A familiar project at this time of year is for a child to trace around her hand and make the resulting drawing into a turkey. The thumb is the head and the fingers are the tail feathers all displayed. While many of the turkeys that are raised for food are now the domestic white variety, the turkeys eaten by the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving were the wild brown ones. The tail feathers on a wild turkey are brown, but they are iridescent. catching light and appearing to be multi-colored. This is why children color the tail feathers in bright colors.

The turkey's head has a wattle under the beak. This is a vertical flap of loose skin that is red colored. Be sure to draw this in order to make the hand turkey look like a turkey. Add skinny legs and bird feet. When done, the children can cut out the turkeys and hang them on the wall. It's really cute to make a whole flock of these turkeys in the sizes of all the hands in the family. The little hand shapes are particularly sweet.

Another nice turkey decoration to make when making Thanksgiving holiday crafts is a turkey door decoration. Make a brown construction paper body and head of a turkey. Now make a large number of colored feather shapes. Each family member writes on a feather something he or she is thankful for before attaching as part of the turkey's tail. Repeat until all the feathers are used, and hang the turkey on the front door to greet visitors with a message of gratitude. Make a sign to accompany the turkey that says "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good!" or simply "Be thankful!" or "We're thankful for you!" or whatever you like.

Children love making construction paper chains. To further decorate the house for Thanksgiving, let them make a paper chain in fall colors as one of their holiday crafts. Using 9 by 12 inch construction paper, cut the paper in half across the long side and cut the halves into one inch thick six inch long strips. Use a stapler to attach the ends of the strip into a circle. Loop the next strip into the circle and staple it. Continue the process alternating colors of brown, red, yellow, and orange. When the chains are long, you can drap them along the ceiling or stair rail. If you don't make the door turkey, the children can write something they're thankful for on each strip of paper before adding it to the chain.

Thanksgiving is too nice a holiday to let the other more commercial holidays crowd it out. By making holiday crafts to decorate the home for Thanksgiving, you can keep this day special, too. The extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc., will be pleased to see the holiday crafts the young ones have made to decorate the house and make it cheerful for their visit.