A Starry Holiday

Last night and today, Baha’is all around the world celebrated the Declaration of the Bab, a holy day that marks the very inception of the Baha’i Faith, which started with a simple but profound declaration of belief by one young man in a house in Persia over a century and a half ago.

This beautiful story was one of my favorites as a child, so of course I wanted to help bring it to life for my little Monkey.  Unfortunately, since the actual historical event took place late in the evening, community celebrations do as well, so some of us decided to schedule an additional celebration during the day for little ones who wouldn’t be able to stay up late enough for the other.

From the Core Curriculum materials (beginning on page 196), I got the idea of using stars as the theme for our celebration.  My little Monkey is fascinated with stars, and it gave us a way to talk to the little ones about Mulla Husayn’s spiritual quest.

Since the Holy Day is all about a spiritual search, we decided to have a simplified treasure hunt using stars.  I created the stars in Word, added a prayer from the Bab, and printed them on yellow cardstock.  Here is the template for them in Word (Treasure Hunt Stars) and as a pdf (Treasure Hunt Stars PDF).

As it turned out, the park we chose – usually empty on weekday mornings – was also being used for an end-of-year barbecue for a local elementary school class!  I was a little nervous to hide our stars in the park with all those extra little ones running around, plus the children that came to our celebration were a little on the young side for a treasure hunt.  In the end we decided to skip it and just give the stars to the kids as a present when telling the story of the Bab and Mulla Husayn.

To complete the star theme, my little Monkey and I made star cookies to share with everyone.  Making them was an adventure in itself, which I will relate in a future post, but the short version is that we had a good time and the kitchen looks almost normal again.

Another mother also brought delicious fruit to share, which tasted wonderful as we sat at our picnic table on this warm, breezy morning.  As they munched, we told the children the story of the holiday, gave them their stars, and sang a few songs based on prayers of the Bab (“Say! God sufficeth…” and “Is there any Remover of difficulties…”)  Afterwards, the kids enjoyed more time on the playground as the grownups chatted.  What a wonderful way to spend the holiday!

This post has also been shared at Bowdabra’s Saturday Showcase.