Church festival day!

One of the many things I love about the Catholic church is that they don't skimp on the festivities. If there's going to be a procession, it's a PROCESSION, often with Knights of Columbus wearing plumy hats to escort the Blessed Sacrament under one of those little silk pavilions-on-poles. If there's going to be a special Mass, like at Easter Vigil or Christmas, it's going to be at an inconvenient time of day for the maximum effect and there are going to be lots of candles and singing and flowers.

It could only follow that if there's going to be a saint's day church festival, then it's going to be a great big deal, with cake walks and carnival games and everyone gathering for the rosary and a biergarten and a massive dinner so that everyone can go home all prayed up and filled with good food, clutching bags of little gizmo prizes.

To that end, I got up early this morning and baked two cakes for the Cake Walk, one a white cake with vanilla buttercream frosting decorated with colorful cinnamon gumdrops, the other a devil's food cake (I couldn't resist) with milk chocolate frosting, decorated with those little Andes mints. It turns out that the Olive Garden didn't hog the entire supply of them to put the brakes on their customers' garlic breath.

So we're getting ready to leave for Mass in twenty minutes. My husband and I will be manning the Golf Zone game for an hour while the girls do Tic-Tac-Toe. Then we'll have dinner and talk to a bunch of our friends and maybe have a beer or two.

THANK HEAVEN the weather is decent today for the first time in forever.