Holy Family Sunday=Hate My Family Sunday

I’m pretty sure that sometime, a couple hundred years ago, some pope had it in for me. I know you’re thinking, “Yeah, sure, dude. I’m sure Gregory the Eighth or whoever developed this modern liturgical calendar was deeply concerned with how it would affect your sad and pathetic little life.” But I say, “Clearly so.” How else to explain the fact that the Feast of the Holy Family falls on the Sunday after Christmas every single year, ie, the one Sunday a year that every Catholic college student and young adult is guaranteed to be sitting in church beside his/her disapproving father and grandchild-crazy mother.

Let’s face it. Most of us were raised Catholic and are now about as likely to darken a church door as reruns of Arrested Development are to show up on the Hallmark Channel. (I myself, with my Eucharistic Ministering plot to meet an eligible, non-gay bachelor, am the rare exception.) But we all go home for Christmas, to listen to our parents tell us every year that this is the last year we will be receiving gifts as we unwrap our new Ipods, to eat ham at Grandma’s house and be slipped a fifty dollar bill and a bag of chocolates on the way out the door with the admonishment to not tell our parents, and to revisit our high school days by sitting sullenly beside our parents in a pew the next Sunday, silently mouthing the words to the Nicene Creed after being elbowed by our mothers and playing a rousing game of “Can I make my sibling wince by squeezing his/her hand during the Lord’s Prayer?”

So some Pope, back in the day, was clever enough to realize that if we’re only going to make it to church one Sunday a year, they ought to make it the one where they can annually beat us over the head with St. Paul’s admonishment to obey [our] parents, and for wives to be subordinate to their husbands (reason number 612 I will probably never get married.) This in turn, seems to make our parents believe they have free license to harangue us for the rest of the day about our life choices and our crazy, liberal, hippy beliefs about gender equality and ideas that maybe, just maybe, we don’t see things quite the same way as our parents and that at the age of 25-ish, it might just be time for them to buck up and realize that the days of obedience are over, and the best they can do is offer unsolicited advice that we will at best, ignore, and at worst, openly mock before defiantly ignoring.

At least this is how it all goes down in my family. No matter what day Christmas falls on, the Sunday after is always that point where we are just about sick of each other and itching for excuses to slam doors and sulk in our childhood bedrooms, if only for old time’s sake. So thanks, liturgical calendar, for adding one more layer to the crazy family Christmas traditions that will keep my therapist in business for the next ten years. At least his kids will get a pool out of it.