There is a lot to celebrate during the holiday season, and Father Dave welcomes Steffani Aquila to help us better honor Catholic feasts in our homes all year. Steffani is founder of Liturgy Culture and Kitchen by His Girl Sunday, an online space inspiring Catholic culture and liturgical living in the home and parish. Her new book is called “Festive Faith: Catholic Celebrations Through the Year and Around the World.”
Steffani explains how her online presence began. “When my husband and I got married, we had a lot of festivity, tradition, and heritage in our house. I thought, why don’t I share and see if people find some good ideas? At the very least, it’ll be an archive of memories for my family. So, we started sharing, and people started following, subscribing, and wanting to know more. It just became a way of being in community.”
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Her goal is to help others celebrate every liturgical season. “I’m going to live my life festively, even if that festivity is in joyful celebration or if it’s in penitential seasons,” she says. “It’s all a celebration of praising God through different means.”
Steffani notes how we can update ancient traditions to make them more accessible for different communities. “I think we need to look at what the traditions are and see what’s realistic and attainable for us. For a cultural tradition that developed in Mexico or in Europe, we’re not going to be able to do that exactly in the same way, and that’s okay. We can take those and we can modify them to fit what we’re doing now,” she says.
“So for example, Las Posadas is very popular down here in Houston. It is the Mexican tradition of the Holy Family journeying from house to house as if they’re looking for the inn. That’s very difficult to do in a huge city like Houston; you’d be driving all night,” she continues. “But I’ve seen parishes who will set up classrooms in the faith formation building, and each classroom serves as a knocking on the door of the home.”
Steffani says, “What I’m trying to do is to break it down so that people can see this isn’t an overwhelming to-do list. This is an opportunity to break away from the work-a-day cycle and to enjoy life a little bit.”
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Another tradition Steffani describes is celebrating the upcoming feast of St. Lucy on December 13. “There is this great family tradition that people can do where their oldest daughter is supposed to dress like St. Lucy. She wears the white to represent her purity, the red ribbon to represent her martyrdom, and the crown of candles. She’s supposed to wake up and serve the family croissants, pastries, and coffee. Then, if she has brothers, they’re called little star boys and dress up with stars on them to help St. Lucy.”
She notes other traditions around the Christmas season such as the Feast of Seven Fishes. “We love having different members in our family bring a fish dish on Christmas Eve, and we celebrate in this huge buffet of fish,” Steffani says. “It harkens back to this time in which the Sicilian people, [fish] is what was at their fingertips. That is how they were praising God to have a Christmas Eve dinner. I think it’s so cool to find people who just used what they had; it doesn’t have to be something over the top. We can just use what’s in front of us now.”
