The Carol Sing
by Nancy Bowker
My 11-year-old
daughter Casey is helping me make Nestle’s
Toll House chocolate chip cookies. We need to
take 2 dozen to church for guests after the 6 to
7 p.m. carol sing. Fond memories of the carol
sings of my youth at First Methodist in Palo Alto
are filling my head.
Casey is good
at measuring but tires of mixing. When we are
ready to drop the dough onto the cookie sheets,
we discover something interesting. On the back of
the chocolate chip package the directions say to
drop by rounded tablespoonfuls. I distinctly
remember it is teaspoonfuls. Now, this is about
my 45th year of making Nestle’s Toll
House cookies, and I think I know.
I pull out my
recipe box and retrieve the old recipe.
Teaspoonfuls. Is it a mistake or on purpose? We
do teaspoonfuls. Later I decide that the company
has changed it on purpose. I wonder if you buy
more chocolate chips this way? My daughter says
maybe a serving is bigger now than before.
I feed my
triplets dinner early. Now that they are 11, I am
hopeful that my boys will be able to sit through
the carol sing. It’s singing, after all, no
sermon.
Something
delays our getting into the van, so we are
cutting it close. I have promised my children
cookies – I had delivered ours this Sunday
morning to a kitchen full of cookies. A couple
minutes to six we park and sprint to the
sanctuary.
We receive
programs from the greeters and thankfully find an
empty pew at the very back of the sanctuary.
“Where are the cookies? When do we get them?”
asks Don. I realize I should have mentioned the
singing earlier.
“After
the singing.” I say.
“There
are 14 songs,” he says, counting them in the
program. He keeps track as they are sung; “Mom,
that was the first one!” “Mom, that was
the second one!” and so on. The only relief
for me is the audience participation song, The
Twelve Days of Christmas. There are four long
songs after that.
The boys don’t
make it – after 51 minutes we are in the
lobby of the church, walking to and fro, using
the bathroom, and getting drinks of water from
the fountain. We go back in.
Don is next to
me, in a collapsed accordion shape, bent double
at the waist with his feet under his bottom and
his head looking at the floor. I lean over and
whisper, “How are you doing?” There is
no answer. I whisper “It won’t be long
now.” Again there is no response.
I straighten
up. Casey, sitting on Don’s other side,
points to his head, which is up against the back
of the pew. I have been talking to his bottom!
Casey and I
laugh uproariously during a particularly solemn
rendition of Silent Night. (By the way, the
Baptists can take any hymn, slow it down and make
it sound like a funeral dirge.) Besides the
cookies, this is the highlight of the night.
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