to lucky email number 381 (as selected by google's random number generator): Annie! Annie, I sent you an email!
- As expected, my readers are 99% female.
- Half of you are 25-34, nearly all the rest are 35-55.
- 90% of you are American, but that other 10% is spread all over the globe, with every region represented. (And one write in for Texas! 😁)
- 90% are Catholic or working on it, 10% are not Catholic (and very welcome!)
- 56% of you have 3 or more kids (true of only 38% of the rest of the mothers in this country)
- The 60% of you who have school-aged kids are pretty evenly split between homeschooling, brick and mortar Catholic schools, and brick and mortar public schools.
- 10% of you are new since George, 50% of you have been around since Mary Jane, and 40% of you have been around all the way since Lulu.
- 70% of you are on Facebook, which used to be SUCH a great way for me to reach you, and is now less great. Only a fraction of people who follow Catholic All Year on Facebook see my posts these days. There's always hand-wringing in the blogger community when algorithms change, but this is the first one that really noticeably affected my numbers. Still, I can't quit it. The immediate interaction is so convenient.
- About 40% of you are getting the posts via email or a feed reader, which means YOU get ALL the posts. 👍 You can sign up for emails in the sidebar right there 👉
- You definitely want me to write blog posts and you especially want notice ahead of time on upcoming feast days, and random kid stuff. You want parenting posts, you want to see Gramblewood, and you want book, TV, and movie recommendations.
- So many of you have the Confession book, and the wall calendar, which really makes me happy, because *I* also have and use them for my family.
- And over 70% of you are planning to get the Catholic All Year Compendium when it comes out in the fall!
- A liturgical year prayer book and a liturgical year recipe book were the big winners for favorite new project ideas, but almost 15% of you did not hate my leggings idea, for which I thank you. 😘
A full 75% of you want some notice on saints' days celebrations. Here's me ignoring that advice and telling you that TODAY is the Feast of St. Mark: scribe, evangelist, naked guy in the Bible.
Wait. What?
It's true. St. Mark's gospel features the description of a young man who, after Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, ended up fleeing the scene in his altogether. He's known as "the naked fugitive" (don't google that) and is considered by Bible historians to be the evangelist himself. 🍑👈🙈 (See Mk 14:48-52.)
Unrelated to St. Mark, April 25th is also the Major Rogation Day, traditionally a day of abstinence from meat as a sacrifice offered for the intention of a successful harvest. See more on Rogation Days in this post:
ROGATION AND EMBER DAYS AND VIGILS: IN CASE YOU WERE STARTING TO THINK YOU HAD THIS LITURGICAL LIVING THING DOWN
St. Mark's symbol is a winged lion, and he is the patron saint of Venice. I picked up two cheese pizzas from Aldi for dinner tonight, and red, yellow, and orange bell peppers to slice and arrange into a mane. Olive eyes, pineapple chunk nose, boom, it's a lion. A meat-free lion. (🐦🐦💎)
April 28th is the Feast of St. Gianna Molla. For us, it's also the anniversary of the day we spent in the hospital with Frankie last year after he was javelined in the head with a pvc pipe and ended up seizing and unresponsive with a fractured skull. His favorite part of that experience was the jello. So, I figure we'll have jello here to celebrate. And one can only assume that St. Gianna made a mean lasagna, so that's what I'm going to attempt.
See you again soon!