Be Thankful… Because Sister Said So
It’s that time of your again: the time for pumpkins, turkeys, professional football, and jello-like substances that are neither tantalizing to the palate nor particularly pleasing to the eyes. It’s also a time for recalling fond memories from days gone by. I am reliving one of those memories as I type.
I grew up in a family of 11 children, in the sleepy Buffalo-area bedroom community of Lockport, NY. I also grew up Catholic. But unlike some of my church-mates who went to public school, I went to Catholic school through the eighth grade. And every year, around Thanksgiving, there were a bunch of traditions we practiced religiously.
On the last day of school before Thanksgiving break started which, curiously, always seemed to fall on a Wednesday, school was light on the academics and heavy on Catholicky stuff. We would have a few cursory lessons only to make it seem like we were learning something. But we would eventually regather in our classrooms, where we sat around and discussed what we were thankful for.
A lot of us didn’t know what being truly thankful meant. We were only thankful because Sister said we had to be although, one year, I remember being truly thankful that the football I had launched on the playground the previous day made serious contact with the head of one of the least-liked nuns in the school. Having completely missed her above-the-shoulder target surface would have been a humiliating feat of schoolyard incompetence.
The Annual Thanksgiving Mass
If you grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school, you know what comes next: the annual Thanksgiving mass. We did it every year at the Sisters of Perpetual Motion with a Steel Ruler elementary school and torture chamber. After cursory lessons and sitting around pretending to be thankful because Sister said so, we were all herded to, and forced through like so many cattle, a small door that conveniently attached the school building to the church.
Thanksgiving mass was an annual tradition. It was subsidized by First Friday mass, an extra mass through which one could gain brownie points by depriving worldly lusts in favor of spending 30 minutes or so with a priest on a Friday afternoon. The nuns at Sisters of Perpetual Motion made sure that we all attended First Friday mass every month.
I’m sure they did it to instill good habits in us young Catholic children. But seriously, the only habit it developed in me was taking bets on whether or not Father Nodoffo would fall asleep while listening to the riveting presentation of daily readings from Sister Monotone, followed by her insightful comments on the same. Father Nodoffo succumbed more than once. I became a pretty good bookie.
As for the Jello
For us Catholic kids, the one thing to be truly thankful for on that last day of school was knowing we would have a couple of days off, days we could spend jamming tons of food down our gullets and following up with copious rounds of street football and flash vomiting. While the nuns offered prayers for the starving children of the world, our biggest concern was whether or not we would be forced to eat Grandma Martha’s latest jello concoction.
To this day, I’m amazed what a skilled grandmother can do with a box of jello, a mold, unidentified objects from the refrigerator, and three hours to kill on the night before Thanksgiving. Jello is to Thanksgiving what fruitcake is to Christmas. It is to grandmothers what Spam is to Hawaiians.
Ah, the memories. I wonder if I could have kept Father Nodoffo awake more often by sliding him a bowl of jello before Thanksgiving mass ensued. I suspect not. I’m guessing he was truly thankful for a comfortable chair and 10 minutes to wander through la la land, complements of Sister Monotone, of course.
