I love a good celebration. I usually spend an hour or two on one of the evenings leading up to the turning of a calendar page preparing for the month ahead and discerning daily, weekly, and monthly goals. At least one or two of my dozen-ish monthly goals is always to celebrate something well: the end of the school year, my middle child’s birthday, our anniversary, the first day of autumn, my oldest child’s feast day, minor and major secular holidays, sacred solemnities… you get the idea. 

I put a lot of thought into making these special moments feel set apart, often hanging a garland or baking a treat for dessert. Celebrations infuse life with anticipation, joy, wonder and reverence and I believe strongly in their pedagogical effectiveness. They teach my kids – and remind me and my husband – about what we value and hold dear, and they mark the passage of time in a tangible way. 

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the counterpart to one-off celebrations: the ordinary rituals of the every day. 

Morning hugs and cuddles. 

After school snack time.

Prayers before meals.

Tidy up dance parties. 

Our bedtime reading routines.

Pillow talk with my husband before I fall asleep (hours before him, ha!). 

While I feel strongly that these everyday occurrences are just as – if not maybe more? – important to my family’s well-being as the holiday and milestone celebrations, I will honestly admit that I am much less thoughtful about them than I am about the more momentous occasions. The routines have developed through repetition more so than through intentionality, and while there’s nothing wrong with the way we are currently reading before bed and eating snacks after school, I do think that with a little bit of care, I could infuse these moments with more meaning. I could make the “routine” more of a “ritual.” 

For instance…

We can pray the Rosary as a family while we wait for the school bus instead of simply sitting on the porch. Rather than seeing those few minutes as time to fill or simply pass, we can use them to turn an ordinary pause in our day toward God. It gives my children the message that prayer isn't something reserved for church or bedtime, but something that belongs in the ordinary rhythms of family life. And perhaps, in those small moments of prayer, we teach them that waiting doesn't have to be wasted time—it can become an opportunity to be present to one another and to God.

Instead of plopping a bag of pretzels on the table for after-school snack time, I could bake a loaf of banana bread or some other treat and serve it on a nice dish. The extra effort might seem unnecessary, but it gives me an opportunity to slow down and turn an ordinary afternoon snack into an expression of love and hospitality. It tells my children, in a small but tangible way, that they are worth the time and effort it takes to make something beautiful for them. In doing so, I’m reminded that even the small, repetitive tasks of family life can become ways of making our homes places of beauty, warmth, and welcome—and of reminding the people who live there that they matter.

I could light candles at the dinner table each night, regardless of whether we’re eating and five course meal (as if!) or Easy Mac. The candles don’t make the meal any fancier, but they remind us to pause and recognize that gathering around the table is worthy of celebration. It tells my children that beauty belongs as much to an ordinary Tuesday night as it does to a Saturday dinner party, and that our everyday family life is something worth savoring. By adding a small ritual of beauty to even the most mundane meals, I can help transform dinner from something utilitarian into an opportunity for connection and gratitude.

We can revamp our bedtime routine. Whereas right now the hour between dinner’s completion and the children being tucked under the covers feels both urgent and chaotic, we could create a rhythm and cultivate a vibe that feels more thoughtful and peaceful. We could dim the lights, put on quiet music, read from a devotional, or simply linger together a little longer before everyone heads to bed. Not because bedtime needs to become an elaborate production, but because we can resist the impulse to treat every part of parenting as something to rush through and check off the list. There is a subtle “just get through it” mentality that can creep into the most ordinary parts of family life, and we don’t have to surrender to it. Life is too short to spend years dreading something that happens every single day. We can choose, instead, to make bedtime peaceful and lovely—not perfect, not elaborate, just intentionally pleasant—because these ordinary hours are part of our actual lives, and we want to live them well.

None of this is about making our lives more complicated, and it’s definitely not with the goal of becoming more Instagram-worthy. It is about refusing to believe that the ordinary parts of our lives are merely obstacles between us and the things that really matter.

The big celebrations matter, of course—the birthdays and Christmas mornings, the first Communions and vacations, the parties and milestones that give us reason to stop and rejoice. We should celebrate those moments wholeheartedly. But our lives are made up of far more Tuesdays than holidays, far more ordinary dinners than special occasions, far more school-bus mornings and bedtime routines than grand celebrations. The little moments deserve to be lived well, too. 

The banana bread, the candles at dinner, the Rosary on the porch, the peaceful bedtime routine—these are small ways of pushing back against the hurried, utilitarian way we can so easily move through our days. As Catholics, we believe that God meets us in the ordinary, and perhaps part of living a life of grace is learning to meet God there, too. We can turn toward beauty instead of efficiency, toward presence instead of urgency, toward ritual instead of routine. We may not be able to make every moment extraordinary, but we can choose to inhabit the ordinary with greater intention. 

After all, this is our life—not the waiting room for some more meaningful one—and it is worth making beautiful.