Our Lady of Guadalupe

Today's Feast day is my favorite of the Marian Feast Day's.  Our lady of Guadalupe is the Patroness of the America's both the North and the South.  She is also the Patroness of the unborn.  My mother in-law was privileged enough to see the actual tilma and she was just amazed at the reverence the Mexican people had toward the tilma.
Mary's appearance to Juan Diego as one of his people is a powerful reminder that Mary and the God who sent her accept all peoples.  In the context of the sometimes rude and cruel treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards, the apparition was a rebuke to the Spaniards and an event of vast significance for Native Americans.  While a number of them had converted before this incident, they now came in droves.  According to a contemporary chronicler, nine million Indians became Catholic in a very short time.  In these days when we hear so much about God's preferential option for the poor, Our Lady of Guadalupe cries out to us that God's love for and identification with the poor is an age-old truth that stems from the gospel itself.
In class we are going to have chips and salsa while watching a video of Juan Diego.

St. Nicholas

Saint Nicholas was the fourth-century bishop of Myra, a city in Lycia, a province of Asia Minor.

Perhaps the best-known story about Nicholas concerns his charity toward a poor man who was unable to provide dowries for his three daughters of marriageable age.  Rather than see them forced into prostitution, Nicholas secretly tossed a bag of gold through the poor man's window on three separate occasions, thus enabling the daughters to be married.  Over the centuries, this particular legend evolved into the custom of gift-giving on the saint's feast.  In the English-speaking countries, Saint Nicholas became, by a twist of the tongue, Santa Claus-further expanding the example of generosity portrayed by this holy bishop.

I have little pouches of butterscotch disc for a treat, representing the bags of gold.