Saturday, March 31, 2018

Custom set of Easter symbols- Waldorf toys

    I love all the mysterious Christian symbols we have weaved into our church art and architecture. For instance, at our cathedral downtown I have been attending mass there for years and was always was trying to figure out what and why in the world was right above the center of our tabernacle. Turns out it was a pelican and a nest of baby pelicans surrounding it carved into the marble. It's beautiful, finally- it took me awhile to figure out it was really pelicans, must be getting old eyes... than it occurred to me- duh a symbol of faith...and then we looked it up. 

    Anyway, I digress. We have a lot of symbols in our faith. So for fun, we ordered a set of custom made Waldorf style animals off Etsy from the Wooden Caterpiller store for Zoe Therese- our littlest daughter. The animals are all Easter symbols. They will totally be fun to play with but all have a meaning.
One interesting thing, I had to draw up  the Easter lily and cross....so I can say I collaborated on the art. They actually look pretty much like what I submitted. I was very impressed!


The pelican was believed to pierce her own breast, and feed her starving young with her own blood.  The same way Christ feeds us his flesh. It became a symbol of Christ. 
The peacock was believed that when it died it's flesh never decayed, and became a symbol of immorality. Then it became tied to Christ rising from the dead and rising to eternal life.
The Easter Lily is associated with purity and peace and has always been associated with the Resurrection.
The butterfly- the caterpillar dies in a tomb (it's cocoon) and is made and emerges into something more beautiful.
The Cross and Lamb- well those are self explanatory.  I do have a fish but he is for our youngest son. It would make a nice addition to the Easter Symbols though. 

There is one more I didn't get a picture of because it's wrapped up so nice I don't want mess with it.
I found these super cute stackable Waldorf Easter Egg toy in another Etsy shop, so her last Easter symbol will be this cute egg from the Sweet Moms shop. Eggs represent many things in the Christian Easter tradition obviously, new life, the Trinity, and resurrection.


 I ordered a few extra things just for fun for each of the kids, but one in particular really got me.


The bee tree- it comes apart into four pieces.

   Our poetry has a lag in it currently since it's the end of the year, we always pick up an extra one or two poems. Three years ago we had learned "How Doth the Little Crocodile," by Lewis Carroll, which is a clever little poem about a lazy crocodile and my kids love anything about animals. Finding out later its the moral opposite of "How Doth the little busy bee," by Isaac Watts, which we are learning currently, out of love for our bees. It wasn't planned on purpose, just accidentally stumbled into this.  
The bee is a model of virtue and hard work. While the crocodile, lazy and deceitful. If you ever have a chance to read the two poems and memorize them, they make a nice compliment to each other.  

Took some photos of Jesus being put into the tomb after our Good Friday service.





It's really hard for me to find reasons to miss our services at our church in particular.  We have so many cool traditions.

Hope you have a blessed Holy Saturday.