Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ - AKA Heart Cookies!

I follow a number of Catholic blogs and one of them happened to mention that this year, on Friday, June 7th, was the celebration of the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Say what? Since I've been wanting Abby and I to participate more in the different Feast days I decided to do a bit of Googling and find out what this day was all about. Turns out the month of June, and particularly this Feast day, is focused on a special devotion to remind us of Jesus' passionate love for us and to make reparation for the sins we commit against him. In further reading of different blog posts on the ways their families celebrated this day I found the perfect activity for Abby and I to do our own celebration. Making heart shaped cookies! 

I cheated a wee bit as I was pressed for time and bought refrigerated cookie dough instead of making my own. I learned two things. 1) Refrigerated cookie dough really doesn't like to be rolled out. They mean it when they say to simply cut the dough, and 2) Refrigerated cookie dough really doesn't taste that good. So next year I'll prep better and make my own dough!

First she placed the heart shaped cookie cookie on the rolled out dough.

Then she used her favorite rolling pin to push the cookie cutter down.

Once we'd cut out all the cookies Abby decided to play around with the remainder of dough.

She energetically patted the dough.

  

And was SO excited with her efforts.

She made sure to give herself a round of applause.

As you can see, this dough wasn't the best for cut out cookies. We did manage to get two decent hearts and one so-so one. 

I frosted the cookies with regular canned frosting to give Abby a base to work with.

Then handed her a tube of icing and a jar of sprinkles and let her go to town.

She was very particular with the sprinkles as she kept trying to pick the ones up off of the paper towel to put back on her cookie.

She quickly went through a second tube of icing as she loved to just squeeze the tube and watch the icing pile up on the cookie.

When she started mainlining the sprinkles I knew our project had come to an end.

Her Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ cookies!

Abby after eating her cookie!

This turned out to be a really fun activity. While cutting out cookies and decorating them we (or really I) talked about how much Jesus loves us, how he's always there for us when we're scared or hurt or need a friend, and how no matter what we do he will always welcome us back to him with open arms. I'd say this Feast Day celebration was a success!