Having a home altar is one of our favorite traditions as a Catholic family! We like to keep our altar fresh every month, changing the theme with the monthly dedication for Catholics. The month of November is dedicated to faithfully departed souls, and this is a very important month for Catholics to remember all the Saints and also our deceased loved ones. You can find all of my resources for living the liturgical year in November here. Today let’s check out these Catholic home altar ideas for November.
Catholic Icing now offers a monthly membership program where each month you receive a big printable pack of goodies to help your family live the liturgical year at home. The best part is that it comes with home altar printables for every single month! A lot of my November home altar items come straight from this printable pack, which help me keep my home altar updated and fresh all the time.
The membership also comes with my complete Home Altar Guide, which tells you exactly why having a home altar is so important and also takes you through exactly how to organize and set up your own.
Note: Membership resources change each month and each year, so the items you see featured here may or may not still be available in the current monthly membership. You can read more about our past membership resources here.
November’s Dedication: Faithfully Departed Souls
I always start with the month’s dedication and try to work my home altar around that, and November is a super meaningful and jam packed month! It starts with All Saints’ Day and usually ends in Advent, so it’s good to hit the ground running in November.
There is a large printable artwork that comes in the monthly membership pack that usually features the dedication for that month. For November, it is a featured beautiful artwork of the Holy Saints by Fra Angelico.
Each month the printable home altar pack includes a candle wrap that goes around one of those glass religious candles. For November, it has lines where you write in your own loved ones that have passed away to remember them in prayer for the month.
This stand up printable prayer triptych also has the prayer for holy souls in Purgatory (from St. Gertrude) with some beautiful artwork of St. Gertrude as well. This is a great pairing with the candle because you can remember the names of your loved ones while praying for their souls.
Remember, this is a dedication that spans for the length of the month, so you haven’t “missed it” if you’re already past All Souls’ Day.
Liturgical Seasons Of November
I always like to have the current liturgical season and color indicated on our home altar. This is super useful for the kids to see it matching what they see each Sunday at Mass on the altar and the priest’s vestments. November Sundays start out in Ordinary time (green) and usually ends with the beginning of Advent, although not always. You can see in my photos that I have a green colored cloth for the beginning of our November altar to reflect the season of Ordinary Time.
In the current (2021) Catholic Icing monthly membership, this liturgical display cube is included. This makes switching the liturgical colors super easy because all you have to do is rotate the block!
Post continues after this brief information about the Catholic Icing Monthly Membership
Monthly Liturgical Membership
Including November Saint Resources
The printable home altar packs come with a “Saint Spinner” each month, which makes displaying some Saint days super easy! After assembling this page, you just rotate the triangle to display the current Saint feast day, which is listed on the Saint Spinner. For November, this included St. Martin of Tours, Christ The King, and St. Elizabeth.
Saint of the day for November: We like to be able to write in a Saint for each day. The home altar printables come with a background each month for a 5×7 frame. It just inserts in the frame, and you can use a dry erase marker to write in the Saint each day!
The “November Litany of Saints” page lists a Saint for each day of the month, so it’s super easy to know a name you can write in.
Important Days To Remember For November’s Altar
- Nov 1, All Saints’ Day
- Nov 2, All Souls’ Day
- Nov 3, St. Martin de Porres
- Nov 11, St. Martin of Tours
- Nov 17, St. Elizabeth of Hungary
- Nov 21, Christ the King
- Nov 22, St. Cecilia
- Nov 27, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal
- Nov 28, First Sunday of Advent
- Nov 30, St. Andrew
The pack also includes blank pages to fill in whatever Saints you want to celebrate, so if you have a special feast day in November, you can display this page for any of them! The Saint Spinner and Triptych cut apart at the end of the month to make holy cards that you can collect, and all of these holy cards are the right size to insert into these Saint information pages. Each month gets its own fun and seasonal background art, but November’s pages are especially useful for year round since they feature the Saints! (some of the holy cards pictured below are from the October membership pack)
Read More About The Catholic Icing Membership
The membership comes with so much more than just home altar printables! You can find more information about what’s included and how to join here.
You can find resources for these feast days and a lot more on my post about living the liturgical year in November here.
