This is a great way to get kids involved with lent! Craft a crown of thorns, and then every time your child does a good deed, he or she gets to remove one of the “thorns”. Hopefully, you have all of the thorns removed by Easter. Then on Easter morning, the crown is covered in beautiful flowers! There are several ways to go about crafting one of these with your kids. Here are some ideas:
Ten Kids and a Dog has some great tips and directions
Check out these colorful crowns of thorns
from Chasing Fireflies! A twist on the original idea.
Catholic Mom’s Helper made a salt dough crown of thorns
and shares the recipe and great directions! By the look of
all these toothpicks, they’re going to be making lots of sacrifices!
I love this crown of thorns from Busy with Blessings.
What a perfect purple place mat!
Family at Feast and Feria made their crown of thorns with
craft sticks rather than toothpicks to be more child friendly.
Rejoice in Hope used a simple grapevine wreath in
place of salt dough for their crown of thorns.
Chreished Hearts at Home is inspired by the visual
display of her own children’s sacrifices half way through lent!
Memories of a Catholic Wife and Mother uses a
certain number of toothpicks per child for her crown of thorns.
Easy and cheap crown of thorns craft!
Growing With My Girls turned their crown of thorns
into an Easter wreathon Easter morning!
You can see another example of turning it into
an Easter Wreath at Famila Catolica.
My friend was telling me about this salt dough crown of thorns and I've been meaning to look it up. Thanks for all the resources! We will definitely be doing this this year.
Sometimes, we bake larger holes into the crown of thorns to hold candles…purple for Lent and switch them to white or gold at Easter.
ALSO…if sacrifices are made and all the thorns are removed (too soon =) during Lent…artificial flowers can be poked into the holes with each additional sacrifice. It turns into a Resurrection Crown!
This makes a really hopeful, pretty Easter wreath too! It's in A Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families. Sorry for the plug. =)
I'm chuckling b/c either a) some must have a boatload of kids or b) they have high expectations!
We may just have to do this. I like the idea of the corporal works cross too – now I don't know which to do :/
We've made the salt dough crown a few years. I let the kids put in their own toothpicks, and we generally end up with more than some of the most loaded down wreaths pictured. Amazingly enough, they manage to get them all off before Easter every year. I paint the crown gold and cover it with the little craft jewels for Easter morning. I've also made a pipe cleaner crown (kind of like the vines) and filled that with thorns. Much simpler to make, and it actually ended up looking really nice, but you can't do the paint and jewels. Maybe if I do that, I'll fill it with the flowers. Probably should decide soon.
Good ideas. I do not recommend using real thorns. I made a crown of thorns with hawthorn branches one year and it took several days for the pain to subside. Those thorns are big (about toothpick size actually) and poisonous!