The Feast of the Cross: What It Is, and How a Family Can Keep It

There is a feast in September that a lot of families have never marked at home, and it is one of the easiest to keep well, because the whole thing fits in your hand.

What the feast remembers

In the fourth century, Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem and searched for the Cross. The feast remembers what she found, and the dedication of the church built over the place where she found it.

When it was lifted up in front of the crowd for the first time, the word for what happened was exaltation, which only means raised high, so that the people at the back could see it too. That is a good thing to tell a child, because it is the plainest possible answer to what the day is for: everybody gets to look at it.

When it falls, which depends on where you worship

This is one of those places where the Church's calendar is not one calendar, and that is worth explaining to children rather than glossing over.

• September 14 for Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran Christians.
• 17 Thoout, which falls on September 27 this year, for the Coptic Orthodox Church, which keeps the Feast of the Cross again in the spring on 10 Baramhat.

If your parish keeps one date and a friend down the road keeps another, you are both keeping the same feast. Children find this genuinely interesting rather than confusing, in our experience, and it is a gentle first lesson in how wide the Church actually is.

Four ways to keep it with children

Read one verse and stop. Galatians 6:14 is the whole feast in a sentence: "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." One verse, read once, beats a chapter nobody finishes.

Put a cross where the day actually happens. Not the spare room. The kitchen, or by the door where shoes come off. A cross you walk past forty times is doing more than a cross you visit.

Let a child hold one during prayers. Small hands do better with something to hold. A child who is holding the cross is a child who is still, and it takes the pressure off having to look reverent.

Tell the story of your own cross. Where it came from, who gave it to you, what was happening in your life that year. This is the part children remember long after they forget the date, and it costs nothing.

The one that costs nothing

Every HappiestLion order already ships with a free Redeemed Cross, made from the material left over in the workshop that would otherwise be waste. That is not a promotion, it is just what we do with the remnant, and we wrote about why in Nothing Is Wasted.

There is a certain rightness to a cross made out of the scraps, and September is the month to say so out loud.

If you would rather make something than buy it, the Orban ring is a free print file on this site, a parish tool rather than a toy. The Legacy Line has the keychains that travel in a pocket, made for ages 3 and up, because they have small parts.

A feast kept badly is still kept. If all that happens in your house this September is that somebody reads one verse and a child holds a cross for a minute, that is the feast, and it counts.