Les Bonnes Choses

Whaddya know, it's Christmas morning!

I'm up late while Rebecca does some late baking for Christmas day dessert. The season was somewhat compressed for me this year, as I was at school right up until Friday the 21st, though that was just to photocopy some music for the caroling. It seems that caroling with the Amabile hooligans is what marks the season in my mind. Until the traditional walk through Marion Villa, it's not the holidays, no matter how many days I've stayed home.

I will now blog about why we didn't attend mass this evening. We tried. We showed up at St. Justin's Parish in London, Ontario (all this is included for google's sake). The church bulletins used to (and may still) have the motto, "the friendly parish". Grossly misleading. With 4 children (at least 2 of them were overdue for a nap) in tow, we took a bench at the back of the church to facilitate quick escape to avoid disrupting mass. It used to be that there was a cry-room at the back, where one could take a crying or disruptive child, however it has been turned into an office. Now, if your child starts acting up you have to ... well, I have no idea where the hell you're supposed to go. Leave the church, maybe? I guess you just shouldn't bring your children to church in the first place.

So after about 15 minutes of the church filling up, a female usher seemed to take some glee in telling us we had to move along because the bench on which we were sitting was reserved for the ushers. As we passed her after collecting our coats and diaper bags, I heard her say something to another usher that suggested that she believed that any idiot who didn't show up early enough deserved what they got. A male usher was indeed helpful in trying to help us find a seat, though by this point, the family would not be sitting together. He did find us two seats, however one parishioner, when asked if he would shuffle down so we wouldn't step all over him in the likely event that Jude fussed, started griping how he came 30 minutes early so he could get a good seat. We told him to keep his seat. I hope his wife was mortified -- many people were watching this transpire, so everyone around must have seen how big of an ass he was. The usher then offered to find us another seat, however at this point, it wasn't worth the bother because all this time the church was filling up, so seats were hard to come by, standing at the back wasn't an option because of fire regulations, and there was nowhere to go with an increasingly fussy Jude. So, we left. That may be the last time I ever step foot in St. Justin's Parish. Odds are better than even that I will be writing both the parish and the diocese. My tolerance for stupidity has decreased over the last few years, and I have started calling people on it.

Update: I checked back today (January 12), and it appears that my blog entry about St. Justin's Parish, the Roman Catholic church serving the White Oaks community, and located on Ernest Ave., in London, Ontario, has made it into the second page of google results for "St. Justin's parish london" (http://www.google.ca/search?q=St.+Justin's+parish+london). Perhaps this little addendum to my St. Justin's Parish entry will put it over the top? My, that would be fabulous if people could read about my experience at St. Justin's Parish on the internet!