Memories Monday -- Remembrances of Thanksgivings Past

I’d say that Thanksgiving is about my third favorite holiday, after Halloween and Christmas.  Of course, it’s special because Cilla was born on Thanksgiving.  My water broke just as I was bringing in the pies. (My mother made sure Ed had the carpet cleaned before I came home from the hospital.)  My cousin Joanna, who is an artist, was doing the birth announcements for us and designed one with a turkey wearing a pilgrim hat carrying a bundle with a baby girl wearing a pilgrim lady’s cap.  If anyone had said anything, or even looked like they were thinking of something, I was ready to say, “Cutesy is the new trendy.”   But nobody did.

When I was a child, we always went to my mother’s parents’ house for dinner.  My other grandparents  lived in England.  Aunt Pooh would be there with my Uncle Joe and my cousins Meghan, Joanna, Bethany, and Jim, and my Uncle Hank (Henry James) and Aunt Judy, and their three children, Jennifer, Jessica, and Jason.  Aunt Judy refused to go literary with the names, although she did try to persuade Uncle Hank to start calling himself H. James, so they could be the Five J’s. 

We kids all had fun running around, but what I liked best was sitting with the grownups and listening to them talk. Someone would always say that Thanksgiving was their favorite holiday, since it wasn’t cluttered with a lot of religious baggage.  There would usually be a debate about what we had to be thankful for, since the world was in such a state and how should we feel about having so much when so many people had so little?  Someone would say something about helping the poor, and everyone agreed that we had to do it, but really what good does charity do when the system continues to oppress everyone?

One year Jennifer, who was just in nursery school, wanted to say grace, but my grandmother saved the situation by suggesting we all go around the table and say what we were thankful for.  I said I was thankful for the Barbie doll and Barbie Dreamhouse I’d just gotten for my birthday.  Aunt Pooh and Aunt Judy looked at my mother, who said, “She wouldn’t give us any peace.  But we got her Veterinarian Barbie.”

Holidays can be delicate situations for divorced families. Janet and Ed’s father switch off between Allison and Ed.  This year, Janet and Kate are coming our house, as well as my father.  There will be some game on TV for the men to watch and Janet and Kate like to help in the kitchen or amuse the kids.  By dinner time, everyone will had some wine, so we'll all get along.  I’m thankful for that and basically for everything.

More Like Urges for Spicing Pumpkins

 

Fall is my favorite season.  School starts, then Halloween arrives, then Thanksgiving, all leading up to Christmas.  And Cilla and I both have birthdays in November.   The only problem with fall is that you know what’s coming next.

On Saturday, I got out everyone’s winter clothes and put the summer ones in garbage bags until I could decide what to do with them.  We had just had the first prediction of frost and the college radio station was playing wistful Autumn songs.  Ed says they're annoying and if he wanted to get bummed out, he'd watch TV ads for animal shelters .  I tell him not to be such a curmudgeon;  the point of the songs is to get pleasantly depressed. 

 

On Monday, I had lunch with my friend Emily who teaches English at the college.  “I see it’s turtle time,” she said.  “You know, your turtleneck.”

“Oh yeah, I got them out on Saturday.”

“How do you get anything done on Saturdays after your debauches on Friday night?”  Emily loves to hear about our Girls’ Nights In.  She jokes (I think she’s joking.) that my stories are the only excitement she has in her life. But since her specialty is early American literature, maybe she isn’t.

“I guess I have a high tolerance.  They say that that’s a sign that you could be an alcoholic, but nobody in my family ever had a drinking problem, so I’m probably okay.”

Emily nearly choked on her pumpkin spice tea.  “Bless your heart, Charlie. You think you’re such a wildwoman, but I think your idea of heavy drinking is two glasses of wine.”

 

“Three glasses,” I said with dignity.  “And we have cocktails.”

We would love to have Emily join us, but before she got tenure, she usually had to go to some English Department thing so she could schmooze and politic.  And now that she has it, she’s free to live the life of a madcap bachelorette and to try to meet somebody, so she can’t be sitting around with three tired out old married ladies on Friday night.

“You know you’re always welcome, but we don’t want to cramp your style.”

“Maybe I will come after Thanksgiving.  I’ll need something after a weekend with the family.”

“Will you be able to hold out until Friday?”

“My mother is going to send me home with lots of food, so I guess I’ll be all right.”

It made me sad that a holiday with your family could drive you to drinking and eating, especially when you don’t have to cook.

Memories Monday --The Meeting

 

 

Even though I am what Barbara Pym would call a “holy fowl” and we have an Episcopal priest in the family, the prospect of a conference with a Catholic priest was almost as scary as being questioned by a homicide detective.  But at least he couldn’t put me in jail.

I’d hoped for a progressive young priest, maybe even one all the girls fell in love with, a Father Whatawaste.  But this guy was old enough to be Father Whatawaste’s father or maybe even his grandfather. He looked like Barry Fitzgerald, but without the twinkle in his eye.

“So young lady,” he said to Cilla, “why do you want to become a Catholic?”

Veronica must have prepped her, because she said, “To learn about God and Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mother.”

“Are you willing to work very hard and make sacrifices?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And what do you think your faith will help you become?”

Cilla looked puzzled.  He looked impatient.  “A mother? Or a nurse?  Or a nun, perhaps?”

“I’m not sure.  But maybe a movie star or a veterinarian or a priest.”  Father Barry looked surprised, but he recovered quickly and put on his stern face, which would have scared me when I was six.  At my age, it just made me clutch my purse.

“Women can’t be priests.  You’ll have to choose something else.” 

Not being Catholic, Cilla didn’t realize that you don’t disagree with a priest.  “But my Aunt Kate is a priest!”

Father Barryfitzgerald glared at me.  “Your sister, I suppose.”  (Obviously, as a male, Ed could not have such a thing as a sister who was a priest.)

“Oh, no,” Cilla clarified.  “She’s not really my aunt.  We just call her that.  She’s my grandma’s friend.”

His eyes narrowed.  “Does she live with her?”

“Oh, no; Aunt Kate has to live in the rectory.  That’s what we call the priest’s house.  And my grandma says that since she’s paying her own mortgage, she’s not going to live in that mausoleum.  I guess we call it a mausoleum, too.”

Father Barryfitzgerald didn’t miss a beat.  “Well, your Aunt Kate is going to Hell and she’ll take your grandmother with her.”

 Ed looked like he was ready to deck him and I wanted to walk out as quickly as possible, but Cilla was too fast for us.

“No she’s not!  You’re a very bad man.  I don’t want to be a priest and I don’t want your old First Communion!” She ran out of the office, with Ed and me trailing along.

“She’s right,” I called back.

I sat in the back seat with Cilla, expecting her to cry all the way home, but she was too busy listening to Ed rant about that SOB and that GD organization, mainly because he didn’t use the initials.

When we told Betsey and Josh what happened, they high-fived Cilla and wanted to call Father Barryfitzgerald and add their thoughts.

I sat them down and gave them a talk about disagreeing respectfully with others, even if they were wrong, but my heart wasn’t in it

Memories Monday -- We're Marching to Zion with a Stopoff in Rome

I’ve always prided myself on the fact that “We’ll have to think about it” doesn’t mean “no”.  Sometimes, though, it is a stalling tactic when I’m hoping the kids will forget about whatever it is they’re asking for, when I know I’ll say yes.  I think it worked once.

But when I told Cilla that we would have to think about her joining the Catholic Church, I was really stalling to give myself time to get used to the idea.  If she really wanted to do it, I knew I’d have to let her.

We decided that she would attend the services (“Mass”, as she called it) and go to religious instruction classes on Wednesday nights.  Then, after a year, if she still wanted to, she could do First Communion.  I could tell that she wanted to ask about the party but was afraid that might make me change my mind.  “And we’ll have the party.  But the money presents will go in your college fund.”

Cilla squealed with joy and rushed off to call Veronica and her grandparents.

I confessed to Karen that I felt a little bit guilty “only thinking about the party and presents,” which I’m sure the children are warned about.  Was I not being respectful of the Catholic Church and not remembering that “It’s all one God?”

She said I was probably angry about the whole thing and had issues about Cilla, “the baby”, getting older and being so independent and that I shouldn’t be surprised if I got pregnant again.

“Good one,” I said.

Anyway, I called the church and Cilla, Ed, and I have appointment to talk to a priest.  Ed fussed that they would probably want a retainer fee on top of Cilla’s bringing an offering every week and something for the classes.

I said maybe we’d make it up with the presents.  “ Short term, maybe,” he said, “but probably not net.”

 

Boo Ho Ho! (Not to mention gobble gobble.)

 

Well, here it is the beginning of November and Christmas Madness has started already.  The Hallmark Channel is showing Christmas movies every day, Christmas candy is out next to the last reduced price candy corn at the drug stores, and on Facebook, people are sharing pictures of Santa with a countdown of shopping days.  Sometimes their comment is “Mwahaha.”

I had the girls over on Saturday night, and, just to be ironic, I served eggnog and fruitcake.   The fruitcake had brandy in it and I had a bottle of rum so everyone could do it themselves with the eggnog.  As a nod to Thanksgiving I got pumpkin spice eggnog as well as the regular kind.  Fortunately, the kids think eggnog and fruitcake are yucky.

“This is probably the last chance I’ll get to relax,” Nikki said.  “I’m doing Thanksgiving, since Helmut’s invited some German friends for ‘a real American feast.’” (She said the last with a German accent.)  “I was afraid my mother would get mad, since we usually go to her house, so I had to invite her and my father.  Fortunately, my sister has to go to her mother-in-law’s.  It’s not that I don’t want them, but still . . . I was thinking I wouldn’t have to get too fancy, since the Germans wouldn’t know the difference, but if my mother is there, she will.”    

“Did Helmut ask you first?”

“He said,”(in a German accent) ‘If you wouldn’t mind Liebchen.’ “ 

“How can you say no to him when he’s so charming and has that cute accent?”

Nikki snorted.

Karen has really gone Methodist, so she is now Assistant Director of the Church Christmas pageant.  “They tell me it’ll be fun.  Now Tom has even more opportunities to tell me how awful organized religion is.”

‘What do you say to that?”

“I tell him he should be glad that I have some organization in my life.”

“I’m doing Christmas, but Missy offered to do Thanksgiving at her house.  I mean my father’s.  I don’t know what the kids will say or what I should tell them.”

“They know what’s going on.  They could probably tell you.”

“Maybe they think she sleeps in the guest room.”

Nikki rolled her eyes and Karen sighed.

“Well, maybe Cilla does.”

“Just hope she doesn’t ask in the middle of dinner.  You don’t want to be spitting cranberry sauce all over the tablecloth.  You can’t get the stains out.”

I wondered if I should have a talk with the children about the situation.  I really didn’t have the courage to bring it up.

“I still don’t know how I’m going to handle Christmas Eve when they’re coming to watch the kids while we go to the midnight service.  My father always slept over.”

“Maybe Missy will be divorced by then and they can get married.”

“Good one,” I said and had another eggnog.

 

 

Memories Monday -- A Party, Presents, and a Veil!

Cilla and Veronica are all charged up about Veronica’s sister’s First Holy Communion.  She gets to wear a “beauty-full” white dress and a veil, they’ll have a party afterwards, and she’ll get presents!

All the Unitarians have is a naming ceremony, which, of course, you don’t have to do (because whatever Supreme Being(s) there is (are) forbid that you’d have to do anything regarding religion, spirituality or whatever reason you are a Unitarian.)  My parents didn’t have me done because my father said it was “foolishness imitating foolishness.”

There have been seemingly endless “rehearsals.”  Veronica invited Cilla to go with her.

“Watch out you don’t get hit with a yardstick” Ed cautioned her.  “Nuns have been known to do that.”

“Oh, Daddy, not anymore.  Veronica’s mom told me.”

Nobody got hit with a yardstick or even yelled at.  Veronica’s mother introduced Cilla to the nun in charge, who had said, “Maybe next year, you can make your First Communion.”

“Oh, Mommy, can I?   Please, please, please!”

“We have to give it serious thought,” I said.  When I was ten years old, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t be one of those mothers who said “We’ll see.”  “This is a very big decision.  We’ll have to pray about it.”

“She just wants the presents,” Josh sneered.

“That’s not nice.”  I pounced on the teachable moment.  “Never criticize anyone’s religious ideas.  It’s all right to ask questions if you’re curious, but you have to be respectful.  And anyway, you just get money that your parents put in your college fund and things like Bibles and rosaries.”

Ed was passing by.  He shook his head.  “Charlie, you may be on the Altar Guild, but you are a still a recovering Unitarian.”  I was too worn out from dealing with Cilla to ask him what he meant.