True, it can be. In fact, I have a confession to make. When I attended mass at the previous parish to which I belonged, my most fervent prayer was for the mass to end as soon as possible. [Try not to judge me. If you were there, you’d understand.]

That parish’s uncharismatic, soft-spoken, monotone-voiced priest just about put me to sleep every Sunday morning with his uninspired homilies that were intricate efforts to interpret the meaning of the Gospel passage of the week. He dissected each Gospel sentence-by-sentence, even word-by-word. His homilies were more like theology lectures and boring in the extreme. I struggled to keep my eyes open, and I could not stop yawning.

Yes, church can be a drag, but it can also be lively and enjoyable. It all depends on the church you attend. Specifically, it depends on the tone the church’s pastor sets. [Please, not a monotone.] When Macho Guy and I moved to a neighborhood just outside a small Michigan town, our new neighbors urged us to changed parishes and I’m so glad we did.

Our new parish is smaller than the last and its faith community friendlier. The new parish’s pastor is a refreshing change too. In the first place, Father Duaine actually has a personality and he does not speak in a soft monotone. Yay! He has a good sense of humor. Yippee! He has an incredible memory—he heard our names once and the following Sunday morning he greeted us both by name when we entered the church. Wow! We learned from our neighbors that he remembers everyone’s name. Impressive. I don’t know how he does it.

I enjoy Father Duaine’s homilies. They are entertaining as well as enlightening. Instead of dissecting the Gospel, he links it to life in today’s world. He always begins each homily with three humorous anecdotes that are connected to the theme of each Sunday’s Gospel. He finds his stories in publications for pastors.

He also shares his own life experiences as they relate to the Gospel reading. He gets his point across with lighthearted humor and simplicity. I have yet to fall asleep during one of his homilies.

Here is the story Father Duaine told that got the biggest laugh of all:

A man, his wife and his mother-in-law travelled to Israel together. Not long after they arrived, the mother-in-law suddenly died. The man spoke to a mortician who gave him two options: hold the funeral and burial in Israel for $5,000 or ship the mother-in-law’s remains home for burial at a cost of $10,000. The man decided to ship his mother-in-law home. The mortician asked why the man didn’t choose the less expensive option and bury his mother-in-law in Israel. The man replied, “About 2,000 years ago, a man died here and was buried. Three days later, he rose from the dead. I just couldn’t take the chance.”

Holy homily humor!

The church we attend in Florida during the winter is architecturally unusual. It is an octagonal shape with walls of glass surrounding the nave; the pews face a center altar. Father Tom, the church’s pastor, has a headset mike and walks around in the nave instead of speaking from a pulpit, and he comes out to chat with the congregation before mass begins.

His latest chat involved parishioners who come up to receive the Eucharist and then leave the church immediately afterward instead of remaining until mass is over. To everyone’s amusement, he demonstrated how they tuck the missal under one arm when they come up to receive the host, then nonchalantly stroll toward the church door and casually drop off the missal onto the missal and hymnal shelves without breaking stride. He suggested they try to be less obvious—they should ask the person beside them to return the missal for them. That got a lot of laughs.

Another thing that sets Father Tom apart is his “church dog” Bridget, a yellow Labrador retriever who greets parishioners at the church door with tail wagging. When mass is over, she enters the nave and carries Father Tom’s missal in her mouth as he exits during the recessional hymn.

A few years ago, when Father Tom’s homily was of necessity about the annual Catholic Sharing Appeal, he brought Bridget into the nave and she lay beside the baptismal font near the entrance. Father Tom said he needed Bridget there because he was going to talk about donating money, and he wanted to be sure to have at least one loyal friend in church who would listen to what he had to say. We all chuckled at that.

Father Tom walked about the nave and began enumerating the needs of the less fortunate in the diocese. About five minutes into his spiel, when he had his back to Bridget, she got to her feet, turned and began to walk out of the nave. The congregation absolutely lost it, most of us laughing so hard that we cried. [I sure did.]

For an instant, Father Tom looked stunned—it didn’t make sense that everyone was laughing because of the CSA appeal. He whirled just in time to see Bridget exit the nave. He did a double take and then called after her, “Et tu, Bridget?” The congregation broke up again, and it took quite a while for the laughter to die down.

Holy homily humor!

In the past, I never suspected that practicing religion could be entertaining. These two charming and fun-loving pastors make me look forward to Sunday mornings. Of course, that means dragging my bod out of bed earlier than usual to attend mass, but it’s well worth it. Barring illness or seriously inclement weather, I wouldn’t miss it.

I do not care for giving the day after Thanksgiving such a downbeat name as Black Friday. I think Black Friday would be more appropriate in October at Halloween.

The first time I heard the phrase, I thought a disaster of major proportions occurred on that day in the past—for example, an extinction-level volcanic eruption such as Krakatoa or a stock market crash. A salesclerk patiently explained to the clueless that it was just the opposite of disaster: merchants coined the name because it is the biggest sales day of the year for them and is so lucrative it is the day that puts retail stores “in the black” [ink, that is]. Charming. Maybe it’s just me, but Thanksgiving and Black Friday are like oil and water. On the fourth Thursday in November, we gather our families together to be cheerful and thankful for our blessings, and then the day afterward is (gasp) Black Friday when many of us shop till we drop. Occasionally, some shoppers literally drop other shoppers who stand between them and one of a store’s few door-buster sales items. Perhaps Feeding Frenzy Friday would be a more descriptive name than Black Friday.

I’ve been shopping online for the past several years. The phrase Cyber Monday sounds more upbeat and benign than Black Friday, doesn’t it? It’s much more convenient and less of a hassle to go from one website to another than it is to drive from one brick and mortar store to another and hunt for non-existent parking spaces before one even gets to shop at all. When I shop online, I don’t have to camp out the night before in front of a store in the November frigid cold. I can shop when I choose on my computer, and I can shop in my pajamas while savoring a cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. No one ever tackles me or tries to rip a bargain from my grasp while I’m shopping on my computer in my pajamas while savoring a cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows.

I’m a grandparent now. I take time out from being a Christmas Curmudgeon to enjoy going with my grandchildren and their parents to the children’s Christmas Eve mass, and I enjoy giving gifts to my grandchildren at Christmas and seeing their faces light up as mine once did at their ages. Those things are still meaningful and fun for me.

In addition to buying gifts for my grandchildren and close friends, I choose a tag each year from my church’s Christmas Giving Tree to provide a gift for an anonymous person, child or family in need. It rekindles my Christmas spirit, and it just plain makes me feel good to make a deserving person’s Christmas a bit merrier.

I no longer write a Christmas newsletter to send to everyone I know. [They’re probably grateful for that and who can blame them. Seriously.] I don’t mail out Christmas cards anymore. I send electronic Christmas greeting cards nowadays. They’re different, I like them, and my friends and family members say they are fun to receive. [The US Postal Service is undoubtedly unhappy about that. Well, they’re the ones who keep raising the price of stamps.]

Macho Guy used to be a Christmas decorating fanatic. Since he and I now spend our Christmases with our sons and their families in their homes, the Christmas decorations around here have been toned down considerably. We don’t hang wreaths. We don’t hang stockings. We don’t hang Christmas lights from the eaves. Our only decoration right now is a small artificial tree that we have on display in the living room. For years, we took that tree down from the attic, put it together, decorated it, and then reversed gears after Christmas. Finally, we decided to leave it decorated, cover it with a sheet, store it under the stairway to the lower level, and take it out each year in December. All we need to do is uncover it, put the Angel on top, and we’re done decorating. Spending Christmas with the kids and grandkids at their homes comes with an added bonus. Our grown children and their spouses do all the work. Macho Guy and I just show up with gifts and great big smiles on our faces and play with our grandchildren.

My Christmas season is fairly low key. However, I do make a few exceptions. For the past few years, I’ve been having fun on my computer counting down the days to Christmas with Jacquie Lawson’s animated advent calendar. Every December before Christmas, Macho Guy and I go with friends to quaint little Frankenmuth, Michigan for dinner, a bit of Christmas shopping in the quaint little shops, and to enjoy all the fabulous outdoor Christmas decorations and Christmas lights there. We attend several Christmas parties annually and make merry. We attend Christmas mass to hear again the Good News of Christ’s birth and take in the beauty of the almost-large-as-life manger on the altar. I watch my parents’ favorite uplifting Christmas movies every year without fail: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34^th Street (the 1947 classic version), and Scrooge (the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim—the best Scrooge ever). Viewing those films takes me back to the Christmases of my childhood. I confess that Scrooge is my favorite guilty Christmas pleasure. It never fails to bring me to tears.

Oh, dear. I just reread what I’ve written and I am amazed to realize that I am not the complete Christmas Curmudgeon I believed myself to be. It appears that I do not entirely dislike the Christmas season. I have found different ways to enjoy it in the present than the ways I enjoyed it in the past. I am not a curmudgeonly Scroogette after all—but you never heard that from me. I have a certain image to protect.

I was fond of the Christmas season as a young adult. It was still fun and festive. My friends and I would meet and go together to midnight mass. There was always a crowd at that mass, and inevitably we well-bred young folks gave up our seats to the elderly folks who arrived after we did. You would think that after the first time I had to stand for an hour during mass, I would learn to wear boots instead of pumps to the service. Oh, no. It was Christmas. It was a festive time. I dressed accordingly. After mass, my friends and I would trek through the neighborhood stopping off at one another’s homes where our parents had spreads of Christmas goodies for all of us. Between stops, we had half-hearted snowball fights—half-hearted because we all wore our good “Sunday go to Meeting Clothes.” At the last home of the night—early morning, to be accurate—we had a group breakfast, and then we scattered to our own homes to thaw out and then sleep in on Christmas morning. Fun and festive.

I wasn’t quite as fond of the Christmas season as a young parent. I wasn’t the one having all the fun anymore. I was the one providing all the fun and excitement. I was the one convincing a kid not to scream and cry on Santa’s lap so the photographer could take a decent picture. O joy. I had no idea how much work was involved. It looked so easy when my mother did it—the decorating, sending out the Christmas cards, the gift shopping, the grocery shopping, the cooking—so much cooking—and the baking (Did I mention that I cannot bake worth a darn?). And then there was the gift wrapping, the gift hiding where Firstborn and Little Brother couldn’t find them, being a kid wrangler for my two boys who couldn’t sit still during Christmas Eve service, and cleaning up the mess after the Christmas morning gift unwrapping frenzy. After a few years of this, I stopped looking forward to the Christmas season. Christmas equaled stress. I began to dread it.

I believe I know when I became a Christmas Curmudgeon. It was the last year we had a huge live tree—one of Firstborn’s friends dubbed it “The Christmas Sequoia.” On Christmas morning, I looked under the tree to see that Baby Jesus was missing from the manger. I alerted Macho Guy and the boys, and the hunt was on. We eventually found Baby Jesus behind a sofa in the family room—gnawed almost beyond recognition. The perpetrator of this desecration, our American Eskimo devil dog, had gone into hiding. We flushed him out and scolded him but the damage was irreversible. Of all the figurines under the tree, why did that wicked little monster choose to chew on Baby Jesus? I was appalled. It was sacrilege, no doubt about it. The boys, who adored the evil four-legged assassin, broke up laughing at what they felt was the absurdity of the situation. It was about then that I snapped. It was Baby Jesus’ birthday and instead of receiving a gift, he was chewed up by an unrepentant four-legged, white-furred spawn of Satan.

It struck me then that this incident was only one indication that the true spirit of Christmas was missing in action, replaced somewhere along the line by a secular white-bearded icon in a red suit who came down the chimney to become a symbol of crass commercialism. A holy day had become a holiday instead.

Until Christmas is once again the way it used to be, the way it should be, and the way it was meant to be, just call me Scroogette. Bah! Humbug!

To be continued next week.