Children learn through their hands before they learn through arguments. They remember the cookies they made for a feast day long after they forget the catechism lesson on the same saint. Lacy Lynch understood this when she launched Catholic Icing in 2009, and the site she built has been putting that insight to work for Catholic families ever since.
What would it look like if the Church's liturgical year showed up not just at Mass but at the craft table, in the coloring book, in the saint peg doll on the shelf? For hundreds of thousands of Catholic families, Catholic Icing has been answering that question for more than fifteen years.
Meet Catholic Icing
Catholic Icing is a Catholic crafts, printables, and activities website founded by Lacy Lynch in 2009, built around the conviction that hands-on engagement with the liturgical year forms faith in children in ways that nothing else quite replicates. The tagline, "Catholic Crafts and More for Kids," names the mission plainly: give Catholic families the practical tools to celebrate the faith at home through activities their children will actually enjoy.
The site covers the full liturgical year from Advent to Christ the King, with content organized around seasons, sacraments, and the feast days of saints. A free newsletter, a monthly membership, and an online shop give families multiple ways to engage, from occasional inspiration to a consistent year-round resource.
Find Catholic Icing in the Discover Catholic Business directory alongside hundreds of other Catholic gifts, crafts, and religious goods serving Catholic families.
How Catholic Icing Started
Lacy Lynch launched Catholic Icing in 2009, a time when the idea of building a Catholic content platform on the internet required genuine vision. Catholic blogging was in its early years, and the specific niche of Catholic children's activities and crafts was almost entirely unoccupied. Lynch stepped in and started building.
The site took its name from the kind of detail that makes an ordinary thing a little more special: icing on a cake, the finishing touch that turns something plain into something worth remembering. Applied to Catholic life, the idea is that the crafts, printables, and activities are not the faith itself but the texture that makes the faith memorable and appealing to children who are still developing the capacity for abstract religious thought.
Fifteen years of publishing have produced an archive that covers the Church's calendar with genuine comprehensiveness. Saints from January through December, all four seasons of the liturgical year, sacramental preparation for first Communion and baptism, Marian devotions, the rosary, and the major feasts of the Church all have dedicated content sections.
The durability of the site reflects something real about its usefulness. Families come back every Advent for Advent content. They come back every Lent for Lenten activities. They search for a saint's feast day and find printables, craft ideas, and a recipe. That cycle of seasonal return is built into the liturgical year itself, and Catholic Icing has organized its content to match it.
What Catholic Icing Offers
The free content on Catholic Icing is substantial. Years of craft tutorials, coloring pages, feast day recipes, and activity ideas are available without a subscription. Families looking for inspiration for any given season or feast day can search the site and typically find something useful. This free layer has built the site's audience and its reputation.
The monthly membership is the deeper resource. For a recurring subscription, members receive access to more than 245 printable pages organized around the liturgical calendar. These include seasonal materials for Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, as well as content for the longer stretches of the year including Ordinary Time and major Marian feasts. The membership is structured to provide materials ahead of each season so families have time to prepare rather than scrambling the day before a feast.
Specific printable categories include liturgical calendars for the home altar, saint-focused coloring pages, prayer copywork sheets for older children, and "how to draw" video lessons featuring Catholic imagery: crosses, chalices, angels, and figures from the life of Christ and the saints. These visual and kinesthetic resources serve children who are still in the concrete-operational stage of development and who learn better by doing than by hearing.
The saint peg doll content represents one of the site's most distinctive offerings. Peg doll painting is a craft accessible to a wide age range, and the Catholic Icing approach turns it into a saint formation tool. Children who paint a peg doll of their patron saint or of a favorite apostle develop a different kind of familiarity with that figure than they get from reading a paragraph in a textbook. The doll sits on the shelf. It shows up every day. It becomes a presence.
Rosary content is another strong pillar. Catholic Icing has produced comprehensive rosary guides, mystery-by-mystery printables, and coloring pages tied to the mysteries of the rosary. For Catholic families working to make the rosary a real part of family prayer, these resources reduce the friction of getting started and help younger children stay engaged.
Sacramental preparation materials cover First Communion and Baptism with printables, activity ideas, and craft projects suitable for children preparing for these milestones and for their younger siblings who want to participate in the family celebration without quite understanding what is happening yet.
The online shop offers physical and digital products including printable packets and seasonal bundles. For families who prefer a one-time purchase to a subscription, the shop provides targeted content around specific feasts or seasons without requiring ongoing commitment.
Browse Catholic gifts and resources for families in the directory, or explore Catholic media and publications for more resources serving Catholic family life.
Why Catholic Icing Matters for Catholic Families
There is a body of research on how children form religious identity, and it consistently points to the same conclusion: embodied, repeated practices matter more than abstract instruction. Children who grow up with consistent rituals tied to faith, who associate the smell of beeswax and the texture of a peg doll with specific saints, who remember making palm crosses on Palm Sunday and an Advent wreath in December, carry those sensory memories into adulthood. They do not need to be argued back into faith. They have something more durable than an argument: a memory that connects faith to love, to home, to family.
Catholic Icing serves that formation process directly. Lacy Lynch has built a site that gives Catholic parents the tools to create those experiences without requiring extraordinary creativity or preparation. The craft tutorials are tested. The printables are ready to download. The recipe ideas are practical. The liturgical calendar organizes it all so parents do not need to remember which saint is coming up. They can check the site and find out.
For Catholic homeschooling families, Catholic Icing functions almost as a curriculum supplement. The liturgical year provides its own structure, and Catholic Icing provides the activities that make each moment of that year tangible. For Catholic school families, the site offers content for weekends, holidays, and the home environment that school cannot cover. For all Catholic families, it provides a way to extend the faith formation that happens at Mass and in religious education into the everyday fabric of home life.
The site has also built something that goes beyond content: a community of Catholic parents who share what they have made, how they have adapted activities, and what has worked for their particular children. That community dimension, visible in comments and social sharing, reflects the genuinely social character of the domestic church. No family practices the liturgical year entirely alone. Catholic Icing has become a gathering point for families doing this work.
The 46,000+ Catholic businesses and resources in the Discover Catholic Business directory include many serving Catholic families with products and content. Catholic Icing stands out for the longevity and comprehensiveness of what it has built over fifteen years.
How to Support and Find Catholic Icing
The free content at catholicicing.com is the natural starting point. Families new to liturgical living can browse by season or by feast day and find practical ideas without any commitment. The search function works well for finding content tied to a specific saint or occasion.
Families who find themselves returning regularly will likely find the monthly membership worthwhile. The 245-plus printable pages represent significant value for families who use liturgical activities consistently throughout the year, and the structured delivery ahead of each season helps with planning.
The free newsletter is an easy way to stay connected without a subscription. It delivers seasonal reminders and highlights new content, functioning similarly to a liturgical living prompt that arrives in the inbox when a feast or season is approaching.
For Catholic parents looking for a gift for another Catholic family, a Catholic Icing membership or a printable bundle from the shop is a practical choice. It is the kind of resource that gets used, that fits into real family life, and that does the quiet work of faith formation without requiring the recipient to first become convinced of why liturgical living matters. The activities speak for themselves.
Catholic Icing is a model of what independent Catholic media can accomplish over time. Lacy Lynch has spent fifteen years building something useful for Catholic families, and the result is a site that serves tens of thousands of families every year as they try to raise their children in the faith.
Catholic Icing Website: catholicicing.com Founder: Lacy Lynch Founded: 2009 Offerings: Free crafts and activities blog, monthly printable membership, online shop, newsletter Directory listing: Discover Catholic Business
Sources:
- Catholic Icing, official website: catholicicing.com
- Catholic Icing, About and membership pages: catholicicing.com