Our parish priests put forth so much effort for us! They have a life of sacrifice, stress, and heartache with very little appreciation from we parishioners. We need to show these devout men that we are thankful for their sacrifice and living witness.
How?
Host a Card Shower!
Host a Card Shower!
For those who don’t know what a card shower is… It’s when a large group of people join together to send cards to someone. Each individual should take a few minutes to send a store-bought card or a hand-made card to your parish rectory. Normally, the time frame for this would be over the course of a week or month.
As the host, you simply need to get the word out!!
I tried to get a Card Shower started for our parish priest. Of course, I had to recruit a few helpers. First I typed up, printed off, and cut out some slips of paper to distribute to parishioners.
They looked like this:
Then I gave a stack of them to a few people to pass out secretly after Masses with the hope that the papers would make it into the hands of parishioners who would send a card. Distributing them can be a challenge if you are trying to surprise your priest, but that’s part of the reason I kept the fliers small!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
This is a perfect activity to do during February for St. Valentine’s day!!!
After all, they don’t get a card from a wife!
~OR~
How about in June for Father’s Day!!
We are all their children!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
My kids each made a card for our priest.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to acquire some wallpaper samples. They worked well for this.
They also used construction paper.
Here are a few pictures:
A few years ago I was lucky enough to acquire some wallpaper samples. They worked well for this.
They also used construction paper.
Here are a few pictures:
I helped my 3 and 4-year-old girls make these.
We used wallpaper, old holy cards, and other pictures.
Get the word out!
Start a card shower for your parish priest!
And tell your friends to host one for their priests!
Let’s show them we care!
God Bless!
~Jen-Marie
Jennifer, what a lovely idea! I will be passing this along to our DRE to share with all of the CCD students as father's anniversary is approaching. Thanks for sharing!
What a great idea. Might be fun to do with the CCD classes.
Wonderful!! Defiantly good for a CCD class or in a school setting!!! Glad to hear a few more priest will see our love!
Thanks for this idea. Was your \”card shower\” a success?Marie
Hi Marie, I'm not sure yet! I know I had several parishioners say they would send a card, but doing is different! I figure even one or two cards is better than nothing!!! God Bless!
What a fabulous idea! I love it!!
Jennifer, this is such a beautiful thoughtful idea for a priest. thanks for this inspiration!! we got a new pastor recently at our parish, and this would be such a welcoming thing to do.
Fantastic idea!!!! thanks for sharing on the NOBH
Just stumbled across this on Pinterest! Love this idea! Thanks for putting it out there!- Heather
what a wonderful idea!!!! I am going to set my calendar timer to remind me to do this in february and June. Thank you!
I know you wrote this blog post quite a while ago, but I just came across it about 2 months ago. Thank you so much for this idea!!! Our priest is from Nigeria and he goes there two times a year. That just happened to be happening right after I saw this post. So he was gone for most of the month of July and we had a retired priest who lives in the are filling in. What a perfect time for this card shower! I had my Teen Youth Ministry kids do the announcement about it and I bought a bunch of blank thank you cards. We provided the cards for free and had a table set up outside of every Mass, for 4 weekends, with the blank cards, pens, markers, and 3 baskets: one large one for our permanent priest, and two smaller ones for the retired priest who was filling in and another priest near us who helps out from time to time (he has his own parish on a nearby military base.) We are a very small, rural parish but I think the response was fantastic. We collected about 45 cards for our priest, another 16 for the fill-in priest (I presented those to him last weekend at the end of his last Mass with us), and a handful for the other priest. I arranged the cards in the basket using wire picture holders stuck into Styrofoam and then added tissue paper to fill in the gaps. The teens presented the basket to Father today, his first weekend back, and he was very surprised and touched.
That’s wonderful, Shannan! Thank you for sharing your experience! May God bless you all for your efforts!