Groomsmen Gifts

#KeyWest #sunset #seascape #nature #boat via dickster1961

I think I might have mentioned that election day happens to coincide with my wife's birthday and our anniversary.  Yes, we got married on her birthday.  It makes life easier for me as I only have to remember the one date and not two separate dates.  Just kidding.  If you follow some of my political rantings, then you can probably guess what I hope she gets as a gift that night.

Actually, if the truth were known, we have two anniversaries.  The first one is November 6th.  My wife and I took a vacation to Key West, and while we were down there, she decided that she was wanted to get married on her birthday in Key West.  We had been planning a church wedding for the spring which we had on May 2nd, albeit a much smaller ceremony than we originally had planned.  The November date is the one that we celebrate.

As I said, our church wedding ended up being much smaller than originally planned.  Originally, I had planned to have my two brothers serve as co-best men and have three ushers.  I still used my brothers as best men and only used one usher, my brother in law.  My wife only used her sister as maid of honor and had no other attendants.

 As is tradition, I needed to come up with gift for my groomsmen.  I really wanted to try to come up with some unique groomsmen gifts.  This was back in the days before everything was online and you could order whatever you wanted from an online site with a large selection.  Back then, there were very few choices of places where you could get those kinds of gifts.  Then, you were limited to whatever selection that the store was carrying.

Any gift that I bought, I wanted to be able to have personalized. I considered a wide variety of items to give the guys as gifts.  There was the ubiquitous hip flask.  I decided against it because at that time none of the guys were really into drinking liquor.  We weren't even into wine that much.  No, we were pretty much all beer drinkers.  So that is what I went with, but a typical beer mug/stein/glass wouldn't do.  I settled on a horned shape beer glass with a pewter plaque that was engraved with their initials.  Now, though, thanks to internet sites, there is so much more to choose from for gifts.

By the way, the photo in this post was taken on a sunset cruise in Key West during the vacation when we got married.

Communion and Confirmation

Image via Wikipedia

As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, my son attends and lives at a school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  I believe I have mentioned this, but just in case I haven't, it is a Catholic school.  My religious background is Protestantism, primarily Baptist, and I have studied other religions such as Buddhism and a few other Christian denominations, including Catholicism.

My wife, on the other hand, was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.  Our first marriage occurred in the country clerk's office in Key West.  We then had a church wedding a few months later to make it official in the eyes of the church and her father.  During the early years of our married life, we did not attend church much.  However, when our son was born, we had him Christened in the Catholic Church.

From then on, we pretty much stopped attending church.  I had a few bad experiences with some of the Protestant churches that I had attended.  I do a lot of studying on my own, but quite frankly nothing on a consistent basis.  My wife eventually became totally disenchanted with the Catholic Church.  I think a lot of her disenchantment occurred during the time frame of all the reports of priests molesting young boys.  She eventually decided to seek a new church and decided on the Mormon faith.  She attended regularly for a while, but has not attended regularly for the past year or so.

Cover of Rich Mullins

The bulk of my son's religious instruction in his almost 18 years has been through children's religious music.  I also introduced him to the music of Rich Mullins.  We used to watch one of his concert videos together for hours on end.  I still remember my son reciting one of Mullins' monologues when Mullins talked about Jesus being a little boy and imagining him playing baseball.  "If Jesus was going to play baseball, just how many windows would he knock out around Nazareth, and who was going to make him pay?"

The reason that I bring all this up is that we had a meeting today at his school to discuss his IEP (Individualized Education Program).  When we got home from the meeting a couple hours ago, we had a letter from the school.  At first I thought it was going to be an incident report from the school that they talked about at the meeting where he ended up getting a bruise on his back from some behavioral incident.  Instead it was a letter from a woman at the school who prepares the kids for their First Communion and Confirmation sacraments.

I would like for my son to go through some sort of religious training.  Even though I do not agree with everything that the Catholic Church teaches, he is there and I think it would be important for him.  I do wonder if he would be able to understand what they are teaching him.  Another question that I would have is would he eat the Communion wafer, or would they have to douse it in BBQ sauce?  The biggest question would be whether or not my wife would want him to go through it given her disenchantment with the Church.    It could make for interesting dinner conversation this evening.