I am actually posting a series of video reflections relating to this:

Holy Week at Home

How do we celebrate Holy Week and Easter from home this year? In this series, Fr. Vogel guides us along the path Jesus took for our salvation using images from the Holy Land. We will consider how we usually celebrate these sacred days at our parishes, and receive tips for how to engage from home, both during and outside our livestreamed services.

Palm Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJ420-sj2k

Series Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk6izfW-zm0KW8wyrg5tsFSI-RwsrH2bT

Livestreamed Services: https://www.facebook.com/cppnebraska/
(Our services are OF.)

So far I just have Palm Sunday posted, but ones for the rest of Holy Week will soon appear.

A blessed Holy Week,

Fr. Vogel

Pray part of the Divine Office, and if you have the capacity, sing it.

These are great. I think it will help if I organize and print (where necessary) all the materials in advance.

Take a cue from the Von Trapp family - sing the office of Tenebrae. (Fun little tidbit I found out reading Around the Year with the Von Trapp Family: in Austria, Tenebrae is called Pumpernette, or "noisy Matins".)

We are going to try to add as much of the Divine Office as we can for Holy Week. It may end up being just me, but we'll see.
We are going to "meet" our homeschool co-op on Zoom at noon to sing the daily Angelus (in English, until I get them all comfortable enough to switch to Latin (which helps because it's one of my goals for our new music class, which I'll be teaching in the fall), and finish it with the Stella caeli extirpavit chant.

We bought a box-(3-book)set copy of and started The Library of Catholic Devotion, and are currently going through Vol.2, which starts at the last days of Christ with the teaching of the Our Father.
We're doing 1 or 2 stories each night, which should get us through the Passion in about a week. We just read Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the temple (which we will hear and reiterate on Sunday), because the passion stories are a lot of short stories/verses with a small explanation at the end of each.
So, the kids are doing this activity sheet as we go.

(I'm going to attempt to make Hot Cross Buns, for the first time.)

I seem to have rediscovered my cooking skills, so maybe I'll do hot crossed buns! By the way, the custom that people tell me of here in Brazil is that on Good Friday one never cooks or does any work, and does nothing 'light-hearted' (like dance, sing, run around playing, tell jokes, watch television, etc.). Older folks remember this being strictly enforced. But even today more pious families still have a more solemn day.

That said, how is one to prepare Easter feast (lunch, dinner), normally? Cook everything the day before? Spend all day Easter cooking? Those of you who normally have had a special feast meal at home for Easter, when did you prepare it or which parts did you pre-prepare?

Just do add - I have also understood that Easter starts at midnight, so if the Vigil runs til 11pm, you go from Church to the pizza place, or the fridge, and wait for midnight to ring, and then start snacking.

My Easter will start at the traditional time (well at least in the ages of faith) I will be following the Sarum timings (and the timings used for all great feasts), we will start after Lunch by singing the Christus Resurgens, followed by First Vespers of Easter. We can then have compline and anticipated Matins. Lauds can wait until Easter Sunday morning!

We will be following the Vigil ceremonies on the morning of Holy Saturday!

Well since we no longer follow the ancient laws of fasting i.e. having our one meal at the end of the day. We now follow the Benedictine modifications, so we have our main meal at lunch time, and the collation in the evening (or split between the morning and the evening).
A discussion of the fasting rules can be found here,
https://archive.org/details/liturgicalyear05gu/page/8/mode/2up
Page 8 et seq. and page 30 et seq. (page numbers as in the book not the programme)

My favourite part,

"The custom of taking something to drink on fasting days, out of the time of the repast, was gradually established; and even so early as the thirteenth century, we have St. Thomas of Aquin discussing the question, whether or not drink is to be considered as a breaking of the precept of fasting.[1] He answers in the negative; and yet he does not allow that anything solid may be taken with the drink. But when it had become the universal practice (as it did in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and still more fixedly during the whole of the fourteenth) that the one meal on fasting days was taken at midday, a mere beverage was found insufficient to give support, and bread, herbs, fruits, etc., were added.”
[1] iv. Quaest. cxlvii. art. 6.

The relevant section from the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas can be found below, I have pasted the part of art. 6 below
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3147.htm

"The fast of the Church is another kind and is called the "fasting of the faster," and this is not broken save by such things as the Church intended to forbid in instituting the fast. Now the Church does not intend to command abstinence from drink, for this is taken more for bodily refreshment, and digestion of the food consumed, although it nourishes somewhat.”

So we can fast, but still have a glass of "something' from time to time...

@teachermom24, I'm still obsessing about the Easter dinner...what should I make, and when? The Easter Mass will be at 9am. Almost there, one more week... so excited. Anyone else cook from scratch? What will you make?

Easter dinner: breast of lamb, roasted fingerling potatoes, aparagus with blue cheese-lemon peel-walnut topping, rosemary rolls, chocolate truffle pie with orange-champagne sabayon and strawberries (this is actually from a Passover menu).

@Chris Garton-Zavesky

Pray part of the Divine Office, and if you have the capacity, sing it.

That's what I'll be doing. I usually chant the whole Divine Office in Latin anyway, so Holy Week won't be much different other than the lovely hymns of Venantius Fortunatus and the proper antiphons, many in my favourite mode IVA, and of course the appropriate readings (in my case from the 2-year Solesmes lectionary).

I use Les Heures Grégoriennes for the diurnal hours, and for the Office of Readings, my own home-concocted Nocturnale using antiphons from the first edition of Ordo Cantus Officii (alas the selections from the new Ordo make it sound like the Ordo "we don't want you to cantus" Officii because they're very difficult to locate). I use the Office of Readings as Vigils and my first prayer at 5:30 am; and I try to do all 7 canonical hours in this time of isolation because, well I have the time unless I'm outside exercising (today was such a day, 80 km on my bike so I did mid-day hour at the hour of Terce before setting out).

In summer, I typically concatenate the Office of Readings with Lauds and do just one mid-day hour, the time of which depends on the day's activities. Which this summer may be very few indeed if the trend continues. I suspect summer activities this year other than mowing the lawn and biking, will consist of lounging on the balcony or in the garden with my laptop, and in the solarium when the bugs get too bad.

Otherwise for Palm Sunday, I will try to locate my little vial of holy water, cut a cedar bough from my property, sprinkle some holy water on it, and display it in my oratory.

Ora

Chanting all 8 hours of the monastic office as they appear in the books I have (1950 Breviarium Monasticum, 1936 Antiphonale Monasticum). Was able to begin this a week ago since I have from March 16 to at least April 27 off of work as I had been planning to spend from the feast of St. Joseph through the Easter Octave at a couple different monasteries. In addition I will be watching the Triduum services via a livestream (today I watched Gower's) and otherwise doing the best I can to stay recollected in this holy time of the year. All of this is relatively easy without work (employed work that is) and spending this "quarantine" in rural Kansas.

While I disagree vehemently with the closing of public Masses, this can still be a very blessed time. I thank God for it and pray all may be able to make the most of it.

Tonight my 6 and 8yo sons read (and sang the hymns of) vespers and evening prayer/compline with me. It was lovely, (even if - I hope they didn't take it as such - seemingly morbid, after their bible stories were about the 2nd coming/end of the world).
I'm using the Divine Office website/app, when I'm unable to get to the computer to use the Antiphonale Monasticum. It's an interesting combination.

Anyone else cook from scratch? What will you make?

I like to make breads, cakes, pancakes, etc. from scratch. One year, I got the baby in the King Cake so I made one from scratch. Didn't have a fancy pan, so this was a bundt cake.