Catching Up

The Inn missed marking St Andrew's Day this year. We were rather busy this Thanksgiving Day/Weekend. Thursday was, of course, The Day itself and for the first time in a very long time we had company for The Dinner. Very pleasant it was, too. Except for the gravy. As you may recall, I am the gravy chef. I tried a new method this year which required using the food processor. The brand new food processor. This was not entirely successful for reasons that reflect rather badly on the intelligence of your servant. But good company smoothed over even the gravy misfortune.

Friday was SWMBO's birthday. It was devoted, in a nutshell, to doing whatever she wanted. Saturday - the synaxis of the birthday, if you will - was spent reconnoitering the Los Angeles Jewelry Mart. The LAJM is not one store but a few square blocks full of jewelry stores, from little booths of 30 square feet or so to proper shops of a couple thousand square feet. Imagine a sort of Disneyland for adult women. Including the requisite dickering and bargaining, a complete investigation is an all-day project.

Saturday was also the feast of the Carmelite martyrs Blesseds Dionysius and Redemptus who were beheaded for the faith by Mohammedans. And C.S. Lewis and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre shared a birthday on that date, too.

And yesterday was not only St Andrew's Day but the First Sunday of Advent. It's another excita, quæsumus collect day and we might have had another "stir up" Sunday to remind the procrastinators to get busy with their puddings:

Excita, quæsumus, Domine potentiam tuam et veni: ut ab imminentibus peccatorum nostrorum periculis, te mereamur protegente eripi, te liberante salvari: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritu Sancti Deus, per ominia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.

But it was not to be. The traditional rite is in Latin, and the pun doesn't work in Latin, does it. Although the Novus Ordo is indeed in English, Archbishop Bugnini thought he could do better than 2,000 years of Christian tradition and wrote his own collect which rabbits on about strengthening the will to do good. No possible way to elicit a pudding pun from that. And the old BCP won't help us this Sunday either. Archbishop Cranmer was of a similar mind to Archbishop Bugnini and tried to improve on the old Sarum rite's collects. He's all "casting away the works of darkness". A good idea, to be sure, but no help in scheduling puddings.