Sr Mary Martha has a wonderful post today on birthday cake, little girl’s umbrellas and how to give children a reasonable chance of growing up in the faith.
I’m quite taken by the manger trick too.
You can ignore the most RC elements if you need to. There’s enough there even for the WWJD brigade.
wonderful exchange 
I draw the line at Padre Pio, and did even before the revelations that have emerged recently.
Professor Whyte used to say that, of all the untheological things one could say to a child: ‘if you are bad Santa won’t bring you presents’ was the worst. I am so not happy with the straw and the manger – toooooo much rests on the parent’s idea of what is good.
But what to I know? not one fully paid up believing wholeheartedly child in all my adult brood – though one who feels that while she should not have a Eucharist at her wedding, so as not to put the groom in an uncomfortable place, ‘it won’t be the same without it’.
It is the intellectual things which make the worse barriers. The children who are beloved and die, the passionate grief of life. Out inability to ‘rework it closer to the heart’s desire.’
Tired and correspondingly sad, I fear, today.
‘our inability’ …
Sorry it’s a hard day Rosemary. Pot suggests Kettle go rest.
As for the manger — I should have been more specific. I liked the bit about adding straw for good things. I can’t imagine taking straw out. My mental image is also of handfuls of straw flying around liberally — not a parsimonious doling out of one wisp at a time.
But then, I think visual praise seldom goes amiss (we’re back to gold stars again…)