2023, Family, Gatherings, holidays, Kids, Uncategorized

The Choir Sees All

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One benefit of singing in our church choir is that we sit in the front of the church and get to watch the antics of the children in the pews during the service. Our congregation is pretty tolerant of noisy children in church. Parents of the most rambunctious children sit in the balcony so they don’t make too much of a ruckus.

The other Sunday our backyard neighbor was in the balcony with her two boys, ages 5 and 3. They are very active boys. Once, this summer we heard the mom in the backyard yell at the oldest one “Don’t you put that rope around your brother’s neck!” Neither boy would sit still in church, choosing to instead run around in the balcony and not listen to their mom. She tried her best to get them to sit quietly, but it was a losing battle, and she eventually left and went home before the sermon. 

What do you think about the Elf on the Shelf? Who were the naughtiest children in your neighborhood when you were growing up?

41 thoughts on “The Choir Sees All”

  2. YA was not a huge fan of Santa when she was very small. She did not really want to sit on any Santa‘s lap out in the world and at one point when we were putting out cookies for Santa, she said “Santa is going to eat my cookies?” followed up with a question about whether Santa would come upstairs. I told her that Santa didn’t have time to go upstairs – he was too busy. That seemed to mollify her. But because of that, the idea of adding yet another mythical character, who moved around in the house during the night seemed like it might be a little too creepy. we did do rain fear food out on the front lawn for several years. This meant that every Christmas Eve after she went to bed, I was outside stomping around in the snow to make it look like reindeer had been there. If she ever noticed that the reindeer prints looked suspiciously like the bottom of my tennis shoes, she never said.

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    2. I don’t recall ever sitting on Santa’s lap either. Maybe when I was too young to remember. But I’m with YA, I was intimidated, and perhaps abit frightened, by the jolly old elf. (Stranger Danger!) :-0

      Chris in Owatonna

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      1. It never bothered YA to visit Santa. We did a few years of dinner with Santa at the local park building. and she saw Santa at the zoo and she saw Santa at the Art Institute. And she would get close enough to those Santas to take any kind of candy that they were offering but not much closer.

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  3. A roommate of mine had Elf on a Shelf – like them, but now they’re way overpriced.

    You are SO lucky to have children in your church, Renee. A lot of ours have now graduated, and after Covid, the few younger ones’ parents haven’t been back on a regular basis.

    I remember a kid named Ski H… who tried to kiss me in 3rd grade. Then we moved around a lot – and oddly enough, I don’t remember any really naughty ones in the neighborhood. At school, though, there was Tom H who called me British redcoat (my last name was Britson) and did nasty things.

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    1. We no longer have Sunday school but have Wednesday school instead. About 150 children and their parents come for a supper, short classroom work, and a short service. It is absolute mayhem. We have choir rehearsal after it is all done.

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      1. Good grief, 150 children! How big is your congregation?

        When I was in 4th-6th grades, our church had Youth Club on Wednesdays – 5 “stations” (probably a half hour each) that included singing/games, crafts, bible study, a film, and then we ate dinner there too. We loved it.

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        1. Our congregation only has about 200 people who show up on Sunday. The folks who come on Wednesday don’t usually come on Sunday.

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  4. The An…..s. Due to being held back, each one of the three brothers was older than the rest of the elementary classes in which they were. All bullies. All bigger. “The An…..s!” Was the signal to run away home.

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  5. I never read “Elf on the Shelf,” so no opinion. Didn’t have one standout naughtiest kid in our neighborhood. There were a few I didn’t like as much because they were bigger and seemed to like to fight more than the other kids. And I’m a lover, not a fighter. 😉

    I’m pretty sure I was seen as the “goodie two-shoes” of the neighborhood because I NEVER got in trouble . . . other than the occasional fight with my sister or little brother. 🙂

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. I have never thought about Elf on the Shelf. Not once.

    We were all naughty, in our turn. But what’s naughty? If no adults witness your actions is it naughty?

    I suppose when we decided, as a pack of kids, to arbitrarily bombard someone’s house with green tomatoes that could be considered naughty. But when, to pass the time we threw rocks and clumps of dirt at each other, was that naughty?

    When we concocted small explosives or played with flammables was that naughty or experimental? When Messing with my chemistry set I concocted a volatile mixture so potent that everyone had to leave the house was that naughty?

    There was a bully who lived across the street, Jerry Seuss. He was a year or two older than the rest of us and would intimidate most of the neighbor kids. I always stood up to him and always got beat up.

    When I had done something that caused my parents to send me to my room, I often would climb out the window. That was probably naughty.

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  7. My neighborhood was me and Steve. Neither one of us was a troublemaker, but my mom still laughs about the time Steve didn’t want to do what I wanted to do and threaten to go home, and I said fine, go home. She always thought that was funny.

    Further up the road was Tim, and there was another guy who’s name I don’t remember, but I know Tim served some time in jail for dealing drugs. I don’t know what became of the other guy. Junior high had a bully, of course, Roger. I’ve said before how I was good at mouthing off… lucky I could run fast too. Back then.

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  8. I was tempted to do an internet search of the bullies from school but it’s too expensive, and what would be the point? My arch enemy, Chester V, absolutely spent time in the Bismarck Penitentiary. Jerry and Ronnie of the aforementioned An…..s went to reform (likely an antiquated formula word) school. That’s enough to know. Hopefully, they became better people.

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  9. We were a roving pack of girls in our neighborhood. We would mess around on the building sites of new homes on the block when the construction workers were not there. I still have a scar on the back of my left hand from trying to move a big cement block.

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  10. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    THere were two boys in our neighborhood who would lie in the street pretending they had been hit by a car, which, of course frightened the neighborhood drivers. I don’t remember playing with them much because of the problems they caused. Somehow they were on a list of forbidden playmates. And then they grew up to be the owners and CEOs of the Blue Bunny ice cream empire. So there you have it.

    We had a difficult trip home yesterday. Lou got really sick with a bad cold that plugged his ears. One hearing aid keeps going off line and running through batteries causing him to be completely deaf AND sick for the entire trip home. It got very hard. He is better today, but what a day it was yesterday.

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  11. I have no opinion of Elf on the Shelf, mainly because I have no idea what that refers to.

    Most of the kids I hung out with throughout my childhood were pretty benign. To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever got in serious trouble with the law. Compared to the kids my dad hung around with when he was a kid, we were angels.

    My most painful memory is of a classmate during my sophomore year in high school. Vicki was a slight, pretty, blonde girl, who didn’t do well in school and didn’t have many friends. I was probably the closest to one she had, and since we lived only three blocks apart, I spent a fair amount of time in her home. The problem was that you couldn’t trust a word that Vicki told you. Depending on how you viewed it, she was either a compulsive liar or practicing creative story telling..

    Unfortunately, one of the stories that she told was about Miss Smith, our English teacher, an unmarried woman in her early thirties. Vicki adored Miss Smith, and told of their friendship and of visiting and hanging out with her in her home. Nothing negative or mean, but it was pure fantasy. Somehow Miss Smith caught wind of these tales, and her reaction seemed out of proportion to the offense, at least to me. In short order, Vicki was kicked out of our school, and transferred to another school in the neighborhood. Within six months she dropped out and found work in a nursery school.

    Two years later, at seventeen, she had a child out of wedlock, and during the year I was in Switzerland, she committed suicide. I visited her parents when I returned to learn what had happened. They were pleased to see me, but really couldn’t give me any insight into what had happened. They speculated that Vicki had been depressed. Well aware of all of the tall tales that Vicki had told in her lifetime, they speculated that she had an inferiority complex and just had to invent a more exciting life for herself.

    The ironic part of this whole saga is that a couple of years after Vicki was kicked out of our school, but was still alive, it came out that Miss Smith and our vice-principal, a married physics teacher, were carrying on an affair. It became public knowledge because his wife discovered it, and committed suicide by jumping off the ferry between Copenhagen and Malmö. I often wondered whether the school’s expulsion of Vicki was based on fears that she might have somehow have been stalking Miss Smith and known about that affair?

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  12. We have these shared innocent recollections of nasty neighborhood kids. I wish kids today could have that instead of rehearsals for active shooters. My wishes are worthless. Actively engaging with youngsters with cooperation of parents could help. Here in Franklin,Ohio, is the handicap of old guys like me being associated with a community of sex criminals. It’s awful. I live closely to the addresses of reported sexual criminals. Every week I get a notification post card in the mail about another move in. PTA? Nope. No standing. Old fat white guy?
    Sorry for my diatribe.

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    1. A friend of mine started a new job as an urgent care physician on Monday. The first week is orientation, and Monday, her first day at her new clinic in North Carolina, spent a good deal of the morning lying on the floor of a closet with the remainder of her care team in an active shooter drill. I can’t begin to imagine what that must be like.

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  13. My grandfather played Santa at the mall for a few years. I have pictures. I didn’t know it was him, but my older sisters sat on his lap too and they knew.

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  14. Like others here, I’m not at all familiar with Elf on the Shelf. Was it a nice Elf or a naughty one?

    My elementary school class in Owatonna was angelic. I was talking to one of my former classmates a few weeks ago and we agreed that we were a really homeogenous, relatively gifted, angelic group of kids. We just all wanted to learn and play together, and we loved our teachers. Wes is right. We were really very lucky.

    When we moved to our Cannon Lake home when I was entering junior high school, we rode the school bus for the first time. The “bad kids” sat in the back of the bus. It was a thing. They said it themselves: “Bad Kids in the back!” I kept my brothers and the neighbor girl as close to the front as I could get them. After my grade school experience I was terrified, and I didn’t know what to expect. They mostly smoked, shared some pot, looked at porno magazines, and threatened anyone who even looked at them.

    I think most of the kids or adults, as the case may be, who are thought of as “bad” are just people who haven’t had all their needs met, and have no clue how to get what they need. I haven’t always lived up to the expectations my parents had for me and I like to think I had reasons for my poor behavior. Now I live up to my own expectations, and like our discussion the other day, I’m just trying to be a good human.

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  15. Thev Elf on the Shelf is a fairly recent development involving an Elf figure who is moved around the house when the children aren’t looking, and who reports to Santa about behavior.

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  16. I sort of missed the whole Elf on the Shelf story, although I’ve seen the merch in stores. It wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. Although I do have an elf that sits with his arms around his knees, and looks a bit like the elf on the shelf as he’s usually pictured. They both have the long legs. My elf predates the story, having been around since the 70’s or so.

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  17. I’ve seen jokes on FB about it, and I just did a search… found these, for one –
    “You’ve heard about Elf on a Shelf – now there’s Pope on a rope!
    You’ve heard of elf on the shelf, now get ready for yeti on spaghetti.
    You’ve heard of elf on the shelf, now get ready for dolly on a tamale. ”
    …

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