I love finding new ways to teach our children gratitude and the gift of sacrifice. Lent is an excellent time of year to do this, as we remember how Jesus sacrificed for us! To do this, each Lent we set up our Lenten Sacrifice Jars! Below is how we use our jars and how you can start this tradition in your home as well!
The 3 pillars of Lent
As most Catholics know, there are three pillars of Lent: Pray, Fast & Give. To make this easy to understand for our kids, we created our three Lenten Sacrifice Jars!
OUR SACRIFICE JARS
Pray
The first pillar and jar we use is Pray. To use this jar, anyone in the family can simply write on a slip of paper a prayer request, any request they would like. Then, at the end of the week, before our we pray our family rosary, we pick out the anonymous requests and dedicate our rosary to them. And each week we start this anew. It’s a great way to get the kids to think about others and to put a bit more thought into their prayer time!
Fast
The second pillar of Lent is Fast. This is probably the most well know to all, including non-Catholics. It’s tradition to fast during Lent. As a family, we all participate in fasting on Ash Wednesday & Good Friday and we fast from meat on all Fridays during Lent.
Along with fasting is sacrifice. This year we started a new tradition of writing down our Lenten sacrifices together on a paper to act as more accountability! The kids kind of loved this idea because they could see what my husband and I were during for Lent this year as well!
Click here for a list of Lent sacrifice ideas perfect for kids–including a FREE printable!
The Lenten Sacrifice Jar for fasting is our ‘Sacrifice Bean’ jar. This is a jar we encourage to fill with good deeds and sacrifices during Lent! For any good or kind deed they do, they put a bean into the jar. The idea is to fill the jar but to keep it anonymous because Jesus doesn’t want us to always sing our praises or be recognized for our good deeds….we should do them all the time, even if unnoticed! The best part…Easter morning the Easter Bunny replaces the beans with jelly beans!!
Give
The third and final pillar of Lent is Give or Almsgiving. In this jar we encourage the children to drop any spare change they may find or earn. The goal is to build up this jar and when Easter comes, we will decide on where to donate our funds. I can’t wait to hear all of the ideas they have on who to donate to! This one is especially fun for our young ones who love to just pick pennies up and drop them in!
Create your own
Creating these jars is super simple! In keeping with the Lenten tradition of living on less and with less, I just gathered different jars I had around the home! I love how it came together with the different sized jars but you could simply use drinking glasses or mason jars!
I also ‘shopped’ my holiday decor bins and found this moss grass and added that for fun. The Pieta statue was an amazing Lenten gift this year from my husband (no, gifts aren’t a normal thing we do but it’s something I really wanted!) Isn’t she beautiful?!
Finally, I printed off some simple labels for the kids to easily read and picked up a bag of pinto beans from the dollar store. Meaning, other than the gorgeous statue, I have $1 invested in this project! Simple and budget-friendly!
Lenten Tradition
I hope that our Lenten Sacrifice Jars inspire you to start your own Lenten traditions! I love to keep our children informed about the church and about Jesus. It’s important that they always remember that and if we can do that in a fun way like this, it’s a win win!
If you have any great Lenten traditions or ideas that you would like to share, I would love to hear them! Comment below or tag @loveandmessiness on Instagram so I can take a peek!
God Bless!
