#they broke my grandma's birdfeeder

[manda-kat]

They should invent a contracter who doesn't dig through and tear up your personal property while working on your house.

[quill-of-thoth]

Christmas with the Convent

Or: a baker’s dozen of nuns take shelter from a theological argument at my grandmother’s house on december 23rd, and I get cookies. My great aunt Sister Mary K was a nun, and also the music teacher at the catholic school my mom and several of her cousins went to. Dominican Sisters are, according to the older members of my family, known for charity work and rulers-to-the-knuckles, but by the time I was a kid they were more known for giving you tic-tacs if you could say a rosary and gatecrashing my grandma’s house. 

Of course, they brought cookies (Pizzelles usually, some devout italian lady had brought her press and her recipe for decorative anise wafers the size of plates, but also shortbreads and other traditional cookies mostly lost to popular culture) as sort of an excuse to arrive, because Grandma had been a member in good standing of the church forever, and my converted-from-Protestantism grandfather kept the convent in honey so he’d clearly seen the light. Most Christmases they’d turn up a few days before or after with cookies, because Christmas eve day was spent preparing for midnight mass, and there was more mass on Christmas Day, but there would usually only be one van load of them, a maximum of about four or five. Most of them were direct friends of my great aunt, or former teachers of Grandma’s Fine Educated Catholic Daughters who wanted to see her many Fine Educated Catholic Granddaughters and play a few rounds of cribbage where penny bets were not sinful because the pennies were never spent.

But one year we got about thirteen, fleeing from the cookie and mass scene at the local convent, because their usual holiday preparations had started a theological discussion that nobody was prepared for. 

There was a birdfeeder outside the convent kitchen, placed on a metal pole, and SOMEONE had decided they were sick of the squirrels knocking all the feed out. Repeatedly. As Squirrels do. This particular sister had, sometime the evening before, greased the pole with crisco, and went happily back to her baking, sure that she wouldn’t have to walk back out to refill the feeder that day, and interrupt the baking that several sisters were doing ahead of christmas. When the first daylight squirrel made a flying leap and a satisfying sliiiiiiiiide-splat in the snow, everyone else was shocked. The kitchen was filled with nuns trying, and sometimes failing, not to laugh, until someone turned to the only unsurprised sister, and asked her what she’d done. “I thought I’d find a natural way to keep the squirrels out,” said Sister Crisco, “So I took the leftover shortening, and -”

 At this point, a sister with a love of fuzzy tree rats, or a moral conviction that keeping anyone, man or beast, away from food the convent provided, burst out, “It is a SIN to grease the birdfeeder with crisco!” I’d like to imagine that the Pitzelle sister stopped halfway through pressing one, and all movement in the kitchen stopped, but I don’t know for sure. I do know, that an argument broke out, someone called the parish priest, and my great aunt said “Oh, look at the time, I have to go to my sister’s house with her cookies and supervise piano carols,” and about half the kitchen, who wasn’t going to sit through squirrel related theology with a straight face, said “Oh, you’re right, I promised to help you move all these heavy boxes Sister Mary K, with your hip in this weather you really shouldn’t be managing an entire tin of pitzelles (which weigh approximately negative one grams per cookie)” and proceeded to flee to my grandma’s house so they could drink itty bitty cups of coffee in peace and pinch the cheeks of any grandkid they could reach.