Sunday Night Rituals

The hell of the hatbox

Some things become accidental traditions

Nearly every Sunday night of my childhood, a ritual would be performed. The exact timetable and the activity differed from week to week, but it was happening. Five members of my six person family would be sitting, usually together, watching TV. Typically, we were zoning out in front of The Wonderful World of Disney, so it was always after 7 pm Eastern Standard Time. I don’t know how we were surprised every week, but we were. It would start slowly, with my mother sighing loudly from another room. And then she would start to make more noise: clinking glasses, shutting doors, turning on the vacuum. By then, our not-fully-developed-brains would catch on: the Sunday drill had begun.

My mother would burst into activity and force us to participate. As we got older, we learned to scatter, but she would yell to us to come back to her command center living room. She’d order us to move our shoes, pick up our cups, get our clean laundry pile. We’d dash in different directions, clumsily non-compliant, trying to complete the tasks in a timely fashion, but with no accuracy. She’d get more annoyed by our fumbling, and we’d be annoyed that we’d lost track of what the Apple Dumpling Gang was doing.