Should You Buy Christmas Gifts Only When Convinced They're Unnecessary?

[turbo]

Catholic families used to be very large. It's not as common anymore, because most ignore that little detail about not using birth control, but back when people followed the church's teachings much more faithfully, 4 or 5 kids would have been a small family, and the only birth control was that mom was too dang tired by the end of the day to have any interest in dad touching her.

Yes! By the time the late 50's - early 60's came around the rhythm method had fallen out of favor and family-size started to drop. I grew up with the younger end (born 1950-1965) of a family that had 18 kids. The father was a mill-worker and the mother was a cleaner/housekeeper for the family that owned the mill. They never owned much of any economic value, but some of their kids were the nicest people I've ever known. Proud, hard-working, decent folks who never asked for help, and who contributed a steady stream of altar-boys to the local parish.

 

[turbo]

What, no hairbrushes or dustbrooms made out of them?

Fuller Brush was well established by the time that I was trustworthy enough to lug the washbasins of blood to the kitchen (maybe '57 or '58). If you dropped a pail of small or large intestines in the dirt, no problem. If you dropped a pan of blood in the dirt (or even spilled a little), the great-aunts would cut you a new one, and your aunts and mother would stand by while you took your medicine. Blood sausage was highly-prized and the women of child-bearing age had first dibs.

 

[turbo]

I should mention that the tongue-lashings were proportional to your understanding of French. The great-aunts would feel free to cut loose with lots of body language and inflection if they thought that you might not not understand everything. I never spoke French to my elders (a shame, but because my mother was dumped into a Maine community at age 6 knowing NO English, she thought that the older members of our extended clan should learn English if they were going to live here, and she made no real effort to teach us French). About the time I was age 6 or 7, one of my great-aunts and my mother got a little surprise, though. She came to visit us, and she was upset. She and my mother switched directly into French for the whole visit, and when my great-aunt had left, I asked "When is Betty-Anne going to have her baby?" Mom asked me where I had heard such a thing and I repeated (in English translation) everything that my great-aunt had said. After that, I was sometimes invited to play outside in the rain or snow. Betty-Anne was in HS and was not married.