Who was that Methodist woman in the Swedish Lutheran church, wearing the black robe?

The Permanent Maternal Record
And: ‘Tis the season!

Bloomington Bird Lady writes: “My mom was a church organist for 37 years, and Christmas time was rather hectic. The music doesn’t just ‘happen’; it has to be planned, practiced and performed. We lived about two blocks from the church, and since we had only the one car, as did most other people, she’d walk over for everything. I can remember Mom taking off running at times to get there ahead of maybe the choir, or the pastor, etc.

“Our Lutheran church was started as Swedish Lutheran. Mom had been Methodist before she married, so some music needed extra time to learn — especially those hymns that were written with Swedish words. Once a month there would be a Swedish service in the afternoon, so she had to kind of guess her way through the liturgy. Early on Christmas Day (probably 6 a.m.), there was ‘Julotta,’ a service in Swedish, to which my grandma would bring me. It would be dark, Mom would already be there, and my grandma and I would walk to church in some pretty cold weather. When we came home, Grandma prepared a real Swedish-style breakfast with potato sausage and lingonberries and rice pudding, and lots of special limpa bread. I still make all these things for our family, but gave up on lutefisk.

“Musicians like to tell stories about overly long services, pastors who printed the bulletins themselves and didn’t know how to spell the composers’ names, etc. Mom had to wear a black robe like the choir, and someone told me, at the church’s 100th anniversary, that they thought she was God — because when she walked through the church up to the organ, the service started. The middle-aged man who said this had been the pastor’s son!”

Everyone’s a (fashion) critic
Or: ‘Tis the season!

John in Highland: “What is with all of the boring, striped ties that people are wearing these days? They remind me of the narrow, ultra-conservative ties that my dad, Ed, used to wear in the 1950s.

“I usually bought the spaghetti sauce at Big Steer Meats. On this occasion, however, my brother Mike offered to do the honors. But what he brought to the house was a can of tomato paste, thinking it was the same as (not to mention cheaper than) spaghetti sauce. Big mistake! That paste was more like tomato soup and had about as much flavor as beet juice.

“In desperation, we tried to ‘Italian up’ the paste by adding oregano, olive oil, flour and even a bottle of Ragu. All we got was a pot of sludge that would have made Julia Child swoon.

“After wasting all that time trying to rectify this divine comedy, I drove over to Big Steer, only to find they had closed 15 minutes earlier, at 2 o’clock. Peering through the window, I could see some workers were still inside. As I tapped on the glass and put my hands together in a prayerful plea, a nice young man graciously opened the door and let me buy a can of the ‘real stuff .’

“‘If you had come two minutes later,’ the man said, ‘we would have been gone.’

“Thanks to this little miracle, the sausage and meatballs were soon simmering in savory spaghetti sauce while the tomato-paste sludge was being dumped unceremoniously down the drain. It made us grimace to think we might have actually had to put that gunk on the spaghetti.

“That’s how a can of Pastorelli sugo Italiano saved a cherished Christmas tradition. And yes, Virginia (and Mike), there really is a difference in spaghetti sauces.

“I only wish Phyllis, our beloved Mom and Nana, who died in May at age 91, could have been with us this Christmas. Before health problems set in, her homemade spaghetti sauce, bread and steamed pudding were culinary masterpieces that made the holidays truly magical.”

In memoriam
Hanging Fruit Division