My Sunday Best

Sunday, when I was growing up, was a day that centered about church. It was all about getting dressed up in our Sunday Best and driving to church in my Grandma's big boat, sage green, with a white vinyl top, Chevy Impala with my dad behind the wheel.

I grew up in a small, traditional country church. Where it was like going to see your extended family on Sunday. The 9:30 a.m. service started with the sanctuary filling sounds of the organ. On a special Sunday someone might play the piano along with the organ. The services rarely deviated from the traditional Order of Worship. I call this Order of Worship the stand up/sit down Order of Worship because there were asterisks next to the things where we had to stand up. 

There were wooden sign holders on the front wall on each side of the pulpit, the ones with the channels to slide the black letters and numbers into. The one sign listed the Psalter Hymnal numbers that we would be singing that day. The other sign had the Sunday School attendance number from last week and the amount of the Sunday School collection. 

After a sermon that always seemed incredibly long and boring (maybe because our pastors were always older), it was time for juice and cookies. The juice was that horrible, brightly colored punch in the plastic milk gallon size jugs and the cookies were almost always the store bought sandwich cookies. I wonder what that punch has done to my insides.

I was only one of two public school kids my age, and the other kid was a boy. The rest of the kids my age were girls, and they all went to the country Christian school together. They always had a weeks worth of shared experiences to talk about and I had nothing. Sometimes it was a little hard to find my place to fit in.

After church it was time to go home for "Sunday Dinner" which was a big meat and potatoes meal. After dinner was the best part of the day, some weeks my Great-Aunt Viola would come out to visit. She was that fun-loving spinster aunt that everybody wished they had. She would play baseball with us in the front yard and go on exploring adventure walks with us. Late afternoon she would head for home and we would begin the getting ready to go to church process all over again for the 6 p.m. service. This service looked a lot like the morning service minus the juice and cookies.

So even though Sunday involved a lot of rituals and preparation when I was a kid, I still have some fond memories that I would not trade for anything.

Wearing our Sunday Best