Friday after Ash Wednesday: Something from Chapter 1

As promised and part of my Lenten discipline, here's one more excerpt from the book I'm writing for my children. This little piece is from Chapter 1:

On the second floor of our house, the parsonage, in York, Pennsylvania, were the bedrooms where in one of them all three of us boys slept in one bed. I remember one episode that to this day gives me a mild sense of memorable terror. It happened a few days before Christmas during the last year of World War II. It was dark outside, and we boys had been put to bed. Apparently, Gordon, Art (or “Butch” as we knew him for years) and I were misbehaving in bed, making a lot of unnecessary noise instead of falling quietly off to sleep. To the left of the bed, the room’s single window opened up to a long second-story porch leading to a door in my parents’ bedroom. As we were cutting up and jumping around, we heard a tap on the window. The blind being down, I slipped off the bed, raised the blind, and stood in abject horror as Santa Claus stood in full red and white regalia, his beard flapping, waving his righteous and angry finger at me, his eyes piercing mine with a look of disgust. I screamed. All of screamed as we rushed out the bedroom, raising one hell of a bellow, rushing down the hall yelling for mom! From the inside of her bedroom, she told us to wait; it would a minute or two before she could appear. After what seemed like far too many minutes, dressed in her nightgown, she came out, innocently wondering what was the matter. We told her about the apocalyptic vision. It was then that she explained that bad little boys sometimes are visited by Santa Claus, and that we’d better learn to be better if we expected anything for Christmas. Lesson learned. Mom walked us back to our bedroom, we climbed back into bed, pulled up the covers, and were good and mostly silent for days. It was years later that mom explained the incident. Dressing from the waist up in the parish’s Santa Claus party costume, she was herself the finger-wagging apparition who scared the hell out of us.

Who would have thought that the lovely lady on the sofa could wag such a scary finger behind a white beard?  

The Fourth Commandment (as Lutherans count them) tells us that we should honor our mothers and fathers.  With this posting I wish to honor my mother whose imaginative discipline that Advent night long ago taught me a lesson. And hopefully helped me develop something of a conscience.