Pioneer Day fun

In the LDS church, we have a special celebration to commemorate the pioneers who sacrificed so much to come across the plains and find religious freedom. Pioneer Day is a fun little holiday that is celebrated hugely in Utah, but those of us in other parts of the world like to remember it too. Although, sometimes we forget, like me who remembered at precisely 10pm last night that today was pioneer day while looking at some of my favorite blogs. I decided to throw some things together for us to at least mark the day. It wasn't much.

First, in the morning I played the Tabernacle Choir's 2019 Pioneer Day concert recorded a few days ago. They have a great arrangement of music with an orchestra and guest artist Sissel.

While listening I cut out some letters to make a banner. I finally got it hung at the end of the day. Oh well. We might leave it up for a few days since I put all that work into it.

Pioneer day is all about just remembering the pioneers, their stories, their sacrifices, and maybe spending the day doing things the way they had done them (think Little House on the Prairie style living). If I'd planned ahead of time we might have cooked outdoors over the fire with a dutch oven. We love cooking with the dutch oven, and that would have been fun. Maybe next year.

I printed up some fun printables for the kids to color, so we decided to do a 3-marker challenge with some smelly markers we picked up at Target. A 3-marker challenge is where blindfolded they picked 3 colors each (or 4 in this case) and color their picture with only those colors. Then the judge (me) picks the best picture. This is one of my boys' favorite ways to color.

They used these smelly markers from Crayola. They had to randomly pick 2 colors from both the sweet and stinky smells. They almost couldn't handle the stink!  (As you can see in one boy's very incomplete coloring job)

I have been wanting to head up to Deseret Book (our church bookstore) for a while and get the new church history book that came out recently (pictured below). I've read part of it online, but I wanted the physical copy to read from. While at the church bookstore it was so fun to see the workers dressed as pioneers, and one even wished me a happy pioneer day. An offer for a small discount was applied if we picked up a pioneer day thing from the basket. We picked the bandana that says "faith in every footstep."

That's pretty much all we did for pioneer day. One other thing I wanted to do was watch a pioneer movie, but that didn't happen. We'll make up for that sometime in the next few weeks. Watching a pioneer day movie can happen anytime!