I think Santa was looking the other way....

My mom was a teacher for almost 30 years. She taught Second Grade at St. George Elementary School. It was a Catholic school where we kids all went. None of us had her for a teacher though because that would have just been weird.

Every year at Christmas we would go down to the Woolworth's and pick out something fabulous for our teacher. I clearly recall there were several consecutive years where my teachers all received a rather large plastic Pink Poodle bottle full of some smelly bubble bath. It was a big bottle for the money so I thought it always looked like I was really giving them something great! I think it cost .99 cents at Woolworth's!

In our family, being the big group that we are, there were and are always a ton of presents for everyone. But no one got more gifts than my mom. She had an additional 28 kids giving her gifts each year. On the last day before Christmas break she would bring bag loads of unopened gifts home and place them under the tree. This was her booty from her students and I, for one, was always envious and a wee bit curious as to what was in there! Somethings were easily discerned. Usually a round tin contained some kind of home made concoction, probably fruitcake or dry Christmas cookies. If we were lucky there would be fudge in there. A cubed shaped box probably contained some kind of ornament for the Christmas tree. We could always tell when she got a lot of coffee mugs and perfume. And there was one unmistakably shaped box that could only come from one place in the world - Fanny Farmer Candy Co.!!

One Christmas, my nephew John asked Santa for a set of Legos. In mid-December, as the gifts started piling up under the tree, our curiosity got the better of us. We saw one package that we were pretty sure was the Lego set. We'd gently kick it, poke at it, flip our finger over a wayward piece of tape...but nothing happened. Then one day we just couldn't take it anymore. We snatched that package and hid under the desk in the other room far away from the rest of the family. We carefully opened the wrapping so we didn't tear it and quietly slipped the Lego set out. We cautiously opened the box and started playing with the Legos. We did this for a while and then just as stealthily put it all away again. The next day we did it again. On the third day, my mom had brought home all of her goodies from school so when we nabbed the Lego set we nabbed the Fanny Farmer Candy box too. Without thinking twice, we carefully, gently and meticulously unwrapped the candy and the Legos. We played for at least an hour and ate every single piece of candy out of that box! We put all the inner paper wraps back in the box and re-wrapped the whole thing and got it back in my  mom coffer before anyone could see us!

That Christmas Eve as we opened our gifts, John did his best to look super surprised that he got his Lego set. But no one was more surprised than my mom when she unwrapped the gift from one of her students, saw that it was Fanny Farmer Candy and opened the box to share it with us only to find that there was not one single crumb of chocolate in that box! John and I said nothing. Mum's the word! It wasn't until years later, when we were both adults, that we ever told anyone what we had done. When my mom heard this she laughed and laughed. All those years she thought the little second grader who gave her the candy ate it himself!

Glad Påsk!

So this is Easter weekend. I grew up Catholic but I have recovered from it. This week used to be one of non-stop church going for me. Led by my intrepid mother, she would parade all 6 of us dressed in our finest, complete with hats, to church for four nights running.

Holy Thursday, aka Maundy Thursday, was the kick off. I recall this one not being so bad as it was just the regular length of a normal Sunday mass except at some point a line of old parishioners would process to the front and get their feet washed by the Priest. I always wondered about those old women who got theirs washed right through their pantie hose.

Good Friday, also a short service, was a kind of strangely silent time. No singing of hymns...just silence and LOADS of kneeling and standing over and over again. Then we would all get a Communion wafer and go home quietly. If we dared to whisper to one another we would get a sharp thump on the back of our heads to shut us up and a VERY STERN talking to when we got home. To me, Good Friday services were just an inconvenient break in an otherwise perfect day off from school.

Holy Saturday - I'll refer to this as the marathon of all church services. It started out in the parking lot of the church, in the dark, in the cold, where we would huddle en masse around a Weber grill while the Priest said some incredibly long prayers and burned all the left over palm branches from Palm Sunday. He'd also do something with a giant Easter candle and then we'd all follow him in, still in the dark, and the BAM! lights on and the choir would kick into what was the first of about a zillion hallelujahs. Add enough incense and smoke to choke a horse, 7 Bible readings, more invocations, a Baptism or three and you pretty much get the idea. It was a challenge to stay awake, not pass out or throw up! The service lasted for three hours and it was almost midnight by the time we would all parade home again.

Easter Sunday was back to the regular Mass length and everyone dressed up like they were going to actually meet Jesus. Hence the hats. The hats were always strange, overly ornate works of art with feathers, veils, flowers or all three attached on them somewhere. We have one picture of all of us standing together in these very flat, very modern jobbies my mother picked out one year. We look like some children who wondered into Area 51 and the aliens had landed on our heads.

I tend not to believe in all this so much anymore and, frankly, I go to church maybe once a year just to appease my mother. She's convinced that I am destined to burn because of this. Still, I have to admit that there was some magic in those rituals. If not magic, at least it was good theatre. There's something to be said for the tradition of it all. But, deep down, I don't miss the torture of this week at all. Being dragged to church four nights in a row and threatened with punishment, abandonment or, heaven forbid, the absence of an Easter basket was no fun for a kid. And, honesty, I don't think it would be fun as an adult either.