Our sacrifice tree is full of  “no complaint crosses”. Each cross has a task written on it. These tasks are things the kids should do without complaint!

The key point here is “without complaint”. I don’t know about all of you other moms out there, but my kids will do the task given to them after they voice their complaints!

I remind them that Jesus took his sufferings without complaint and we all need to do our daily duties without complaint, too!

 Each of the crosses has a daily duty listed on them. The daily duties are things that we have to do each day, but they are things that we should do without complaint.

Some of the things that we wrote on the crosses were: “doing our chores”, “helping our brothers and sisters”, “brushing our teeth”, “cleaning our room”, plus, things like “no wining, instead ask nicely”, or “no complaining about others”, “don’t complain when you are bored”, “no complaining about the temperature in the room” (that’s a hard one for me) etc… We easily added 20 crosses to our tree.

It was a great reminder for the kids to keep the Lenten sacrificing in mind throughout the day and to not complain about the things we can do as a sacrifice for God!

I printed the crosses onto purple paper. (purple for sacrifice)

Just cut a piece of purple construction to a size that will fit into your copier.

I printed the second and third pages onto red paper.
(red for Christ’s Passion)

The kids made a list of daily activities, which they should do without complaint. I wrote them on the crosses for the younger kids and they hung them on the tree.
We made our tree with sticks and an old glass jar filled with rocks (to weigh it down).

They can even add a cross whenever they think of another situation when they shouldn’t complain.